AActive

Inspiration

We were thinking about the American Airlines challenge and a member of our team mentioned that jet lag was a big problem she faced when traveling to India. We realize this was a problem that nearly all of us faced, and that there was no attempted solution released yet.

What it does

Our app calculates when you need to sleep on the flight in order to feel refreshed for your next destination (assumably in a new time zone). It does this by sending push notifications to the user while on the flight, reminding the user to sleep. It also has an optional health questionnaire that users can take to improve the app's sleep calculations using user-provided information about other factors that affect sleep, such as caffeine intake and alcohol consumption.

How we built it

The application was built in swift with a firebase backend. We edited the JSON files provided in the challenge API and imported them into firebase to populate our database with flight and user info. The application itself has three pages: the log-in page, the home page where we implemented the timer, and the user profile page where the user is able to input in optional data to better optimize the sleep schedule predicted by the application.

Challenges we ran into

Initially, during the brainstorming phase, we came up with numerous ideas that were already implemented or too similar to past ideas. We had to narrow down three pages of ideas down to two original ideas and then went from there. Specifically, within our app, we struggled with writing the algorithm to calculate when a person should sleep because we weren't sure how to conceptualize the time difference.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We're proud of how original and innovative our idea is; this is a problem that affects about 96% of all flyers, but there's currently no solution to this that works through an app or an official airline company. Our app works to solve a problem that directly affects flyer experience.

What we learned

We learned a lot about teamwork throughout this challenge; we had to balance the amount of work we did with the number of people and different skill sets we had on the team. As a team, we attended a lot of workshops that helped with our hack and used different interfaces and languages we don't traditionally use, such as Swift. We also developed more of the "hacker mindset", having to work through challenges within our code and troubleshoot.

What's next for AActive

Some of the ideas we were thinking about incorporating into AActive in the future included push notifications on when to eat meals (to help reset their clock), notifications to get up and walk around during the flight (to prevent DVT), and notifications to help the user with their sleep schedule 2-3 days after they land. The app, in future, would also be able to incorporate data from wearable technology, enabling the app to monitor heart rate and from that information deduce stress levels and further personalize the sleep schedule.

Built With

• firebase
• swift