PowerNap: Recharge

Inspiration

Most students can’t afford to rest for long durations (too much homework, outside obligations, studying, etc.), which means they require more efficient sleep. This can be achieved by tracking REM sleep cycles and waking user upon the completion of a full cycle, which in turn ensures that a nap can be short while still maintaining its efficacy. We built PowerNap because we believe that anybody regardless of age or workload should have the tools for a restoring power-nap.

What it does

PowerNap intelligently detects your sleep cycles in order to wake you up at the right time to prevent grogginess and feel well-rested. It is scientifically proven that waking up right after your REM cycle is the optimal time to wake up so we implemented this as a way to dynamically know when to wake you up at the most opportune time.

How we built it

We built our application using Fitbit Studio an app development IDE that uses JavaScript as the main language. The Fitbit API is very helpful with guides and tutorials on how to control different sensors and collect data. For our application, we used Fitbit's Sleep Web API which automatically detects which sleep phase you are in. This is perfect as it made our implementation easier. For security purposes, we used OAuth2 to create keys. To make the app as simple as possible, we kept the settings menu to one slider (configuring the number of sleep cycles) and the app on the Fitbit only shows a black image for less visibility while sleeping.

Challenges we ran into

Before Los Altos Hacks, we didn't know about anything related to JavaScript, Fitbit Studio, or REM cycles. However, with extensive testing, trial-and-error, and insightful questions asked to the mentors/staff, we crafted a project that we are all proud of being a part of.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are proud of our persistence on a difficult project. As none of us had prior experiences in any of the subject matters in our project, we had to research and learn on the go. Although this was a struggle, our persistence in our common goal: enabling everyone to have consistent, quality sleep, greatly contributed to us reaching our goal. In summary, we are proud of our tenacity to overcome initial challenges to develop a finished and working product. In our limited testing, we haven't encountered any errors in our code. However, extensive testing would be needed to ensure the quality of our design.

What we learned

We learned about how to develop apps for the Fitbit interface, JavaScript, and sleep cycles.

What's next for PowerNap: Recharge

Although none of us have a Fitbit, there is a simulator that works seamlessly with Fitbit Studio. This will make it easy to test out our application in order to push updates through our GitHub repository. Future updates would include vibration strength control, improved integration with the existing Sleep application included on FitBits, and code optimizations to increase battery life while improving naps.