RiSync

RiSync, a free tool to help you re-synchronize your sleep schedule after becoming jet lagged.

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💡 Inspiration

As many travelers have commonly expressed, jet lag is something that many people wish they didn’t experience when traveling around the world. The feeling of being groggy or tired while on vacation is something that hinders an individual's ability to experience the world around them. As so, we became determined to figure out how we can provide users the opportunity to enjoy their vacation, conference or travel plans while ensuring they feel the most rested while away from home.

🤖 What it does

RiSync uses an algorithm that calculates when the user should be exposed to sunlight or should be sleeping given the inputted time zone difference. It bases these calculations on the human circadian rhythm and the solutions to reset it. By scheduling yourself to be exposed to sunlight at certain portions of the day, your circadian rhythm will naturally reset. Our Web Application organizes these times for you.

⌨️ How we built it

We designed our solution using figma and created our web version of RiSync using the React.js Javascript Library. As well, we deployed our Web application using Google cloud's Compute Engine, to host a nginx server on their SSH connection. We also used the Google Places Api to search through locations around the world and the Google Timezone Api, to take a location and convert it into a timezone utc offset value which we would then use in our jet lag calculations.

🥊 Challenges we ran into

As a group of Software Engineering students, we were all foreign to the concept to ui/ux design. By attending the figma workshop however, we were able to get a great first introduction to creating prototypes to websites. This helped us create our logo, design our product as a team and transfer all of our color codes as well as images to our react code effortlessly.

When initially designing RiSync, we had planned to use Googles SQL database to store user login sessions and data, however as we developed our solution it became less and less important to develop the database. As a result, we ran out of the time needed to connect the database to our web application.

Another challenge we encountered was representing the logic we learned about how your body temperature changes throughout the night. Our algorithm would have also ideally displayed how your body temperature would drop based on when your schedule was planned however we didn't have time to implement this feature.

🎉 Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of the design we were able to produce with the experience we had as well as the functional React.js website. Given such a short amount of time we were able to brainstorm a solution to our problem, design the interface, and create a project we can all show off proudly.

📚 What we learned

We all took this opportunity to further our understand of React.js, how Material-UI and bootstrap works, how we can work with the Google Api's, and how to design a web application using Figma. We also learned how you can fix your sleep schedule (especially after this hackathon) using sunlight exposure.

🌇 What's next for RiSync

We look to further develop RiSync to help provide these tools at a free cost, compared to other jet lag fixers that come at a cost.

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