Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool

Sleep loss and fatigue may lead to reduced performance and an increased risk to safety during many activities, including spaceflight. Your challenge is to develop an operational sleep shift scheduling tool that provides autonomous customization of a schedule for sleep, exercise, and nutrition to manage fatigue.

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Summary

We developed an interactive prototype that allows users to have a simple dashboard with all their daily activities: exercise, rest, food and work. This system allows us to control other devices and have a follow-up of physiological and mental health in order to achieve goals more effectively without sacrificing sleep.

How We Addressed This Challenge

All in one

Most of us are used to segment our days in different time blocks, so we simplify this in our dashboard that allows users to keep track of their overall health, tasks, routines and follow up easily their logs. 

We have developed a mobile app that allows users to manage most of their daily activities in just a few clicks. We enable users to connect other devices wirelessly in order to control variables of their environment and achieve their goals more easily. We hope to track events from different systems in just one app in order to simplify users’ life.

How We Developed This Project

How a physician, a designer, a physicist and a biomedical engineer can work together?

We are a multidisciplinary team of students from different backgrounds and we were looking for a challenge to get out of our comfort zone. All of us were involved in the different development stages of the project so that we had the chance to learn from each other.

Nowadays it is common to find apps in the digital apps stores that give you some insights to manage your time and tasks. However, none of them allows you to keep track of the different variables that are related with productivity, such as the emotional state and sleep quality. For us, it is important to understand which environmental factors and activities affect sleep and diminishes performance. Our approach is to facilitate tasks and activities organization using a simple dashboard that allows users to achieve their goals even simpler having in consideration that we should maintain physical and mental health.


Remote collaboration without coding skills

We used online digital tools to have our meetings and develop our project, some examples of these apps are: Miro, Figma, Framer, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, Google Docs, FlatIcons and Coolors. This allowed us to work at the same time and to get all of us involved in the project and contribute from our experiences and knowledge we have acquired as students.

We decided to develop this interactive prototype because any of us had experience in developing apps or programming languages.

However, this was not an impediment to lose motivation and exchange ideas so that we can address this problem. One of our main achievements has been to take advantage of technology despite not having coding skills and not being at the same place to develop this project.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

NASA Human Research Program

We looked for information at the evidence reports of the NASA Human Research Program and the Human Health and Performance Risks of Space Exploration Mission Evidence Book from the same agency. First, we read the Risk of Performance Decrements and Adverse Health Outcomes Resulting from Sleep Loss, Circadian Desynchronization, and Work Overload report.

This allowed us to exchange some ideas from each point of view and encourage us to look at some other scientific experiments in the Evidence Book and other academic research databases.

We tried to identify common problems in the space scenarios, to explore the different facets of the problem and organize our ideas for possible solutions, we worked on using an online whiteboard tool.

Project Demo

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Check out our video here.

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Interact with our app.

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Data & Resources

References

  1. NASA, Human Research Program. Risk of Performance Decrements and Adverse Health Outcomes Resulting from Sleep Loss, Circadian Desynchronization, and Work Overload.
  2. Evidence Book: Human Health and Performance Risks of Space Exploration Missions.
  3. Wu, B., Wang, Y., Wu, X., Liu, D., Xu, D., & Wang, F. (2018). On-orbit sleep problems of astronauts and countermeasures. Military Medical Research, 5(1), 17. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40779-018-0165-6
  4. Traon, A. P., & Roussel, B. Sleep in space. Acta Astronautica. 1993 29(12), 945–950. doi:10.1016/0094-5765(93)90014-n 
  5. Kobak K, Kasztura M, Dziegala M, Bania J, Kapuśniak V, Banasiak W, Ponikowski P, Jankowska EA. Iron limitation promotes the atrophy of skeletal myocytes, whereas iron supplementation prevents this process in the hypoxic conditions. Int J Mol Med. 2018 May;41(5):2678-2686. doi: 10.3892/ijmm.2018.3481.
  6. Jha, P. K., Bouâouda, H., Gourmelen, S., Dumont, S., Fuchs, F., Goumon, Y., Bourgin, P., Kalsbeek, A., & Challet, E. Sleep Deprivation and Caffeine Treatment Potentiate Photic Resetting of the Master Circadian Clock in a Diurnal Rodent. The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience. 2017; 37(16), 4343–4358. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.3241-16.2017
  7. Blume, C., Garbazza, C., & Spitschan, M. Effects of light on human circadian rhythms, sleep and mood. Somnologie : Schlafforschung und Schlafmedizin = Somnology : sleep research and sleep medicine. 2019; 23(3), 147–156. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11818-019-00215-x
  8. Pandi-Perumal SR, Gonfalone AA. Sleep in space as a new medical frontier: the challenge of preserving normal sleep in the abnormal environment of space missions. Sleep Sci. 2016; 9(1):1–4.
  9. Poza JJ, Pujol M, Ortega-Albás JJ, Romero O, Melatonina en los trastornos de sueño. Neurología. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nrl.2018.08.002
  10. Durmer JS, Dinges DF. Neurocognitive consequences of sleep deprivation. Semin Neurol. 2005 Mar; 25(1):117-29. doi: 10.1055/s-2005-867080. 
  11. Stampi C. Sleep and circadian rhythms in space. J Clin Pharmacol. 1994 May;34(5):518-34. doi: 10.1002/j.1552-4604.1994.tb04996.x.
Tags
#sleep #mobileapp #activities #schedule #data #telemonitoring #healthcare
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.