Around the world, social isolation has disrupted many people's sleep schedules. Because of this and a disruption of routine from being quarantined at home, many are spiraling into episodes of mental illness. We know sleep is an integral part of being healthy, so we decided to deal with this lack of routine by incentivizing people to maintain their circadian rhythm, even in isolation, like astronauts do. By playing along with the "game", people feel a sense of accomplishment by being healthy and sleeping. Our project acts as a motivator to get people back on the path to normalcy, as you the more one sleeps, the faster the shuttle progresses. The sense of progression promotes good sleeping habits and schedules; even though it seems simple, similar apps have proven to increase productivity and focus! With STS-SLEEP, one's daily routines become an in-orbit adventure as normal people learn how valuable sleep is for their everyday missions.
Inspiration
Our team was inspired by our personal experiences. We are a group of four high school seniors that have been forced to miss our last months of high school, prom, and graduation. The lack of strict scheduling and routine has, inevitably, caused our sleep schedules to disappear, resulting in us falling asleep at sunrise and waking up at noon. We wanted to build something we would personally use, so looked into how we could fix our sleep schedules, preferably before we all leave for college in the fall!
Approach
We knew we wanted to make a project that would address sleep, so we decided to start doing preliminary research. We found a lot of work related to sleep, circadian rhythms, and how astronauts are affected in the ISS. We looked at multiple studies, put out by NASA scientists, that addressed these, and we knew we had a problem our project can address.
Our team decided to make a chrome extension because we thought it would be the most effective way to reach a lot of people. Additionally, it would be super easy to setup on the users' side, as everything would be on the home page. Also, everybody on our team knew basic web development, so we weren't afraid of the use of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to write our extension.
The basic display and graphics were handled with HTML and CSS, but the more complicated animations and the sleep tracking functionality were built in vanilla JS. We give heads up notifications on how to improve sleep quality and re-align your circadian rhythm using data from astronauts on the ISS. There is a lot of information about experiments, such as trying to produce artificial light/dark patterns onboard to trick the astronauts into healthy sleeping patterns. We also added data about cognitive impairment due to lack of sleep, drug usage, and mental health. This assures we give the user as much information as possible to stay healthy and happy during the social isolation period!
Reflection
Although STS-SLEEP may be a simple project, we put a lot of heart and research into it. After looking at NASA data and many studies, we discovered the extent to which poor sleep is an obstacle in manned spaceflight. We thought it would be cool to make something that could help isolated humans on earth relate to their astronaut counterparts in orbit, while building a tool that even scientists in space could use.
Our biggest challenge was getting started with the extension. Even though we all have experience, none of us built a chrome extension before. However, Google provides comprehensive guides, so we eventually got the hang of developing STS-SLEEP.