Quick question, how many hours did you sleep last night?
In the past year, considering the constantly changing situation in our lives, all the anxiety and mixed feelings, most probably all of us encountered sleep deprivation. Do not worry, you are not the only one. Two-thirds of adults across all developed nations do not obtain the recommended 8 hours of nightly sleep.
Sadly, sleep deprivation is much worse than many people think. Just have a look at the following numbers:
- Inadequate employees sleep costs America and Japan $411 billion and $138 billion each year, respectively
- 37.9% of people reported unintentionally falling asleep during the day or at work in the last 30 days
- If you sleep less than 4 hours/night, the risk of having a car crash increases 12 times
- Half of the Europeans report feeling sleepy during the day between 3 and 4 days a week
9 Million Americans take prescription drugs to help them fall asleep. Those using sleep pills have a 35% higher chance of developing cancer, according to BMJ
If you are not comfortable with these figures, maybe it is time to change your sleep behavior.
Since this year’s mindit.io Hackathon topic was education, we, The Sopranos, decided it would be great if we can teach people how to use technology and scientific data to their advantage, when it comes to sleep. This is how dREaM came to be.
Incorporating the latest medical research and following the recommended sleep patterns, the app we developed in 24 hours automates the steps for a good day-to-day sleep routine. Leveraging the smart home devices (from lights to drapes and room temperature),users’ homes will be customized to create the ideal, scientifically backed sleeping environment. It all starts with you simply setting the morning wake-up time, and from there, dREaM will map out a daily schedule with cutoff hours for foods, beverages & activities that affect sleep, will notify you to facilitate observing this schedule, will provide valuable insight into these recommendations and, one hour before the calculated bedtime, it will start preparing the environment for a restful sleep. Based on the devices you integrated in the app, the air conditioning will automatically set itself to 18 degrees, curtains will close out, lights will be dimmed, relaxing music will start playing. Automatically.
It sounds simple, but if you learn “how to sleep” you can literally improve your life, without even realizing it.
The sugar and spice behind this idea were Spring boot, Hibernate, Java 11, MySQL and Ionic and the secret ingredient, or, in professor’s Utonium’s words, ‘everything nice’ is the fantastic teamwork, coupled with the copious amounts of fun we had. We even have bloopers! Soon, we started to “dream” we will have a working product by morning. I know, we tested on ourselves how sleep deprivation feels, and honestly, we didn’t like it.
But who are we?
Ioana – Project Manager
Mihai – Backend Developer
Denisa – Backend Developer
Dariana – Frontend Developer
Daniel – Frontend Developer
Victor – Product Owner
Split between 3 cities, Cluj-Napoca, Bucharest and Constanta we had a 24-hour long Microsoft Teams call, where we constantly discussed, even when we went outside to have a cigarette break. What’s the best part about this? We didn’t feel like we were separated by screens and we worked fantastically together.
By sunrise, we already had a working product, an almost finished business plan which includes a monetization and growth plan as well as all the estimated costs. What we didn’t have? Well, we didn’t have much energy left, we were out of Redbull and we didn’t have the presentation.
With a last “push”, by 10 AM, we ran out of coffee, the business plan was ready, we had a presentation and a working product. We struggled to write the e-mail where we added all the documents and then we slept happily ever after. Just kidding, we woke up the next morning and started a new beautiful week.
What a time to be alive! But let’s not forget to sleep at least 8 hours a night😊
Our friend, Morgan Freeman, would like to conclude this article by telling you this: “The Sopranos won mindits 2021 Hackathon and with all due
