Inspiration
Sleeping during your vacation days??? This is not how you want to spend you week away from work! Jet lag is a common problem from those longgg international flights that travelers encounter. But this can easily be preventable with ZeroLag!
What it does
For each person, a flight experience varies with different sleep schedules, making general advice not so helpful. ZeroLag is a personal app that takes into account a user's sleep schedule, travel itinerary, and personal prefernces in order to beat jet lag before it happens. Additionally, it reminds you to stay hydrated during your trip since it is quite easy to get dehydrated while traveling! In the end, the user's travel will be much better
How we built it
For this mobile app, we started off with a lo-fi mock up on sketch and Figma, laying out the main requirements/functionalities and how the user experience should be. From there, half of the team worked on the backend servers: American Airlines Flight Engine, time-zone algorithm, etc. The other half worked on the front end, setting up the storyboard on Xcode and linking it up to the internal code.
Challenges we ran into
Developing the algorithm to smoothly transition normal sleeping hours between time zones gave our sleep-deprived brains headaches. Because we were short on time, we initially tried to quickly code an algorithm without planning, only to end up with confusing results. The challenge here was to take a step back from coding and intricately plan out the design of the algorithm, with working examples. We also needed to understand the purposes of the many different time objects (Date, DateComponents, TimeZone, DateFormatter, etc).
Transferring local data between View Controllers.
Only one of our members was experienced in iOS development, so there was a large learning curve when we initially began working on ZeroLag.
We wasted the first 6 hours of the hackathon chasing an unrealistic project.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
- It's 3 out of our 4 members' first time presenting at a hackathon!
- The amount of work we got done in the short period of time!
What we learned
- Swift and iOS development
- How to destroy sleep schedule in one day
- How to create an app to fix sleep schedule
What's next for ZeroLag
- More Personal: Take into account if a person is a Night Owl or Early Bird. And if the user is open to taking Melatonin.
- More Advice: Aside from a set sleeping schedule, light exposure can play a huge role. Plus, exercise reminders to keep the blood flowing!
- Improve Algorithm: Be more accurate in timing and the most efficient way to prepare someone before the flight.
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