Sleep Synchronizers - Space Apps Challenge

Sleep Synchronizers| Sleep Shift Scheduling Tool

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.

Space life

Summary

Space life is an app that will assure a successful mission. Space life keeps track of astronauts’ quality and quantity of sleep, exercise and eating, by giving feedback and countermeasures to ensure an efficient life. Each crew member has an account where they put their data about their sleep and diet. We have also added breathing exercises that one can do before going to sleep, improving sleep quality and mental health, both of these factors are important to have energy and motivation for work. The data can be easily sent to their doctor via a cloud service. The doctor would be able to determine if sleep medication or a consultation (e.g. with a mental health professional) is needed.

How We Addressed This Challenge

Astronauts have to adapt to each situation in a constantly changing environment as the International Space Station is. Therefore, they need a schedule that supports them. Based on the research made by the National Space Biomedical Research Institute, we established the following factors to consider for the development of an efficient schedule: Sleep time, exercises and eating. Each crewmember will have an account which they would use individually, with the addresses of the flight doctor. The app will track sleeping time with a timer, will recommend exercise and eating times and food types, align with the ship data for light, temperature, noise and activities as launch, landing, docking and undocking times. Then, all the data will combine and for the schedule for each day.

How We Developed This Project

We considered NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute's information and researches about astronauts' sleep. We read articles and watched videos about life in space and then we discussed what we’ve learned. We started brainstorming about ideas. We’ve considered taking data from smart bands, but we think they wouldn’t be accurate enough to draw conclusions. Then we made the prototype of our app in Figma.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We have used the data from NASA and the National Space Biomedical Research Institute site to help us get a better perspective about the problems that astronauts face for sleep and address the solution better. We search for NASA astronauts' schedules and previous solutions to have an innovative idea.