Introducing InMoodForLife, a sleep tracking and analysing device for young people with mood disorders
Last October, the Eclipse Internet of Things (IoT) Working Group announced the Open IoT Challenge 3.0, and our team decided to propose a project to solve a real life problem currently without solution. It was the beginning of InMoodForLife.
In this blog we will speak about our project and why and how we decided to build it, we will track our progress, we will expose the obstacles we will find and how (hopefully) we will overcome them. So please, come back often to get updates.
What’s InMoodForLife about?
For the Open IoT Challenge, we wanted to attack an unsolved real life problem, and one that could help to show how IoT and Open Source software can have a real impact to help people.
So we choose a well documented and very real problem: the influence of sleep patterns on children and teenagers with bipolar mood disorders.
InMoodForLife aims to build a device to track and analyse sleep patterns for young people with bipolar disorders, in order to better regulate their sleep rhythms, contributing them to prevent mood swing relapses.
Why is sleep regularity so important in bipolar disorders?
Bipolar disorders are characterized by a disturbance of the biological clock (which regulates the wakefulness and sleep cycles), a fragile clock that must be carefully protected,
A particular attention should be given to sleeping schedule , as sleep has a great impact on the disease: a bipolar person has a harder (and slower) time to recover from a change in routine or from a lack of sleep than a non-bipolar one.
Research has shown that disturbances in daily routines could make them more likely to experience new episodes (mania / hypomania or depression). Current research shows that helping people to achieve and maintain social rhythms, including a regular sleep schedule and adequate physical activity, helps to prevent new thymic relapses.
How can InMoodForLife help?
Currently there are almost no tool to help bipolar people and their families to archive and keep regular sleep patterns or to measure the influence of irregular ones in the thymic relapses, besides modest notebook based methods of writing down sleep and wake-up times.
InMoodForLife wants to give bipolar people, especially young ones, a tool to monitor and analyse their sleeping patterns, helping them to find and maintain a rhythm that suits them and helps them to reduce bipolar relapses.
Tracking and analysing sleep is not new, is it?
These last years we have seen lots of devices marketed as sleep trackers, surely some of them would be a suitable solution for the problem, wouldn’t it?
Well, surprisingly enough the answer is not, they aren’t, especially for young people. Most of these sleep trackers are awesome devices, but they are consumer oriented, directed and marketed for a wellness use case. And they are particularly not suited for children and teenagers as they usually aggregate data using algorithms tailored for adults.
Luckily, some sleep trackers also expose a raw mode, giving access to the raw metrics that can be analysed independently from the device. The real challenge for InMoodForLife is then to build a system executing sleep analysis algorithms adapted to young people with bipolar disorder. The system, based on open source software and hardware, should expose a dedicated dashboard with a neat UX.
Finally when dealing with a medical oriented device, privacy is not an option. This is the reason for embedding the solution into a hardware device.
And those are our objectives with InMoodForLife. In the next post we will tell you about the sleep tracker we use as base, and how do we extract raw data from it.
