A team of interdisciplinary students under the name #Runtime_Terrors from Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal, recently participated in the ninth International NASA Space Apps Challenge and got elevated as a global nominee, becoming eligible to compete at the global level.
The hackathon was organised by NASA Incubator Innovation Program in association with ESA, JAXA, CSA ASC in the first week of October virtually on a global scale, with participants from various backgrounds and cultures.
The competition, which was scattered around the world had about 13 active centres in India among 255 global virtual centres.
MIT students competed in the Hyderabad centre (Megha Institute of Technology) and bagged the best People Choice award whilst competing with over 250 registered teams.
The interdisciplinary team worked on an innovative, state-of-the-art machine learning, deep learning and adaptive hardware solution to aid interstellar travellers, astronauts and shift workers in scheduling their lifestyle and sleep scheduling, under sustain sub category in “Take Action” theme.
The inventive modelling by the team incorporates a web-based real-time scheduling solution that gives customised work, diet and sleep schedule on a daily basis, subjected to astronaut input, by effective utilisation of Johnson Space Centre’s Circadian Rhythm research data, said a release from the institute.
In addition, the team’s ingenious design of a sleep-inducing mask helps in real-time heath monitoring and sleep tracking aiding in suggestive recommendations to the end user. Adaptive light therapy, oxi-pulsemeter and deep and REM sleep detection, just to state a few, are some of the incorporated features in the sleep-inducing mask. To extend the prospect of future design and innovation, the team made the source code and the design files accessible to the general public under CC licensing in github https://github.com/gokulp01- /nasa-hack. The team members included Arvind Karthik Muralidharan, P. Gokul, Akshaye Vaidhyanathan Iyer, Shivam Mahajan and Rohan Nigam, all of the fifth semester.
