Proposal
Sleep is a physiological phenomenon that is indispensable to human beings. In a person's life, sleep accounts for nearly one-third of the time. Its quality is closely related to human health, which shows how important sleep is to everyone. But contemporary people have become more and more difficult to sleep because of various personal and social factors. According to the annual sleep survey released by the National Sleep Foundation (NSF), 60% of adults have sleep problems for several nights in a week(Balakrishnan et al.2005). However, different people, the cause of insomnia, is not the same. We summarised the suggestions given by our classmates and teachers in the oral pitch，our team decided to analyse the causes of sleep quality through their daytime activities, rather than to analyse the various physical data after they fell asleep. Identify this incentive and help to solve it with online expert advice.
The project aims to find out how to use technology products to help people improve their sleep quality. Further, how to use technology products as a link to consultants and people with insomnia, so that they can have effective communication. Many people have sleep problems, but they don't understand what is causing their sleep quality to be affected. Of course, the reasons are diverse. So our concept of this technology product is to record people's behaviour for a day, it can be through the wearable device to detect the amount of exercise, heart rate, etc. and then upload data to the APP. It can also be that people take the initiative to record their own diet and work. The system will score your day's behaviour, the higher the score, the more likely you are to get a good quality sleep. A low score will also be wired to help you analyse your "bad behaviour" and provide suggestions for you to change it.
In order to investigate and research this project in-depth, we will collect a large amount of literature and find a target user with insomnia to conduct a series of follow-up investigations, from the previous interview to the later prototype test. We should get a lot of useful data. After this semester's exploration of this project, we not only have a good design concept for the final product but also can really help our target group to explore the cause of the problem and seek solutions.
Sleep is an important part of people's lifestyles and affects people's daily lives. People with bad sleep habits may have disorders in many areas (mental health and physical health) such as fatigue, irritability, general malaise, listlessness, unresponsiveness, headaches and inability to concentrate. People's sleep habits are recorded in many different works of literature. By reading these documents, we analysed the impact of people's daily lives on sleep quality.
Many studies have shown that long-term use of the media, coffee, lack of exercise and learning pressures and other unhealthy lifestyles can affect the number and quality of sleep in some students (Huen, et al., 2007). Sleep quality depends on people's social status and economic ability. Some people pursue high social status and sacrifice sleep, and they may shorten their sleep time (Basner et al., 2007; Biddle and Hamermesh, 1990). Working hours and culture are other factors that influence people's sleep habits (Melbin, 1978). For example, some specific jobs require people to spend more time and energy at night so that people's sleep quality will be affected.
Family problems are factors that affect people's sleep habits. In some single-parent families, parents spend more time caring for their children and educating their children, thus reducing parents' sleep time. On the other hand, housewives who take on more housework will reduce the quality of sleep.
Some studies have shown that eating habits directly affect sleep quality. Alcoholic coffee stimulates the nerves and reaches people's spiritual excitement. When people drink alcohol, alcohol produces some substances that stimulate the brain, which is exciting.
Using technology will affect sleep and perceived stress, and increasing the use of mobile phones will result in poor sleep quality and perceived stress. For example, some people are addicted to playing mobile games or using more mobile apps, which will make them spend more time in their daily lives and lead to lack of sleep. As the use of various electronic media (such as televisions, computers, video games, mobile phones and audio devices) increases, the use of multimedia influences on an individual's lifestyle becomes more and more important.
Research on the relationship between media use and sleep focuses on the impact of multimedia use on people's sleep. Previous studies have shown that people who install TV in their bedrooms are more likely to sleep on weekdays and weekends than those who do not have TVs in their bedrooms and spend less time on the bed. In addition, people with game consoles in the bedroom sleep late on weekends and spend very little time on the bed. (Van Den Bulck, 2004)). The trial of mobile phones also has the same trend. Studies have shown that the more people use smartphones after turning off the lights, the more they feel tired (Van Den Bulck, 2007). Among teenagers, it has been found that different multimedia is used in the evening. Including media usage (television, mobile phone, online computer use, computer games, listening to music) is related to the number of sleep hours obtained. (Calamaro et al., 2009).
Only a few studies have investigated the relationship between media use and adult sleep. One study found that the longer adults watch TV and use the Internet before going to bed, the greater the probability of sleep deprivation (Suganuma et al., 2007). However, another study found that good sleepers and people with poor sleep did not differ in the frequency of watching TV in bed (Gellis and Lichstein, 2009). Because of this inconsistent discovery, and because there is little research on the relationship between media use and sleep in adult surveys, there should be more research in this area.
In addition to focusing primarily on children and adolescents, research in this area often overlooks variables that may be associated with media use, sleep habits, and symptoms of insomnia, such as gender, age, anxiety, and depression. For example, research on adolescents shows that girls use online instant messaging more than boys, while boys spend more time playing video games than girls (Ohannessian, 2009).
women are at higher risk of insomnia than men (Ford and Kamerow, 1989; Sivertsen et al., 2009; Zhang and Wing, 2006;). The relationship between insomnia and depression and anxiety is also well documented (Taylor et al., 2005). In some studies, age is closely related to sleep habits and insomnia. Adolescents and young people seem to be more inclined to stay up late (Roenneberg et al., 2004). The prevalence of insomnia increases with age (Sivertsen et al., 2009). Media use by young people is also more common than in older people (Suganuma et al., 2007). Based on these findings, attention should be paid to gender, age, anxiety, and depression to study the relationship between media use and sleep, as they may be confounding factors.
Through the factors summarized in the article, our group will explore in this research, how people's living habits affect their sleep at night, our products will consider these factors and design a combination, products The function is to be able to more intelligently analyze the impact of these people's behavioural factors on sleep quality. In the later stages of design, our group will conduct a large number of interviews with users and collect more information to analyse these causal relationships and improve our products.
Team Lemon would like to design a multi-platform application working on both mobile phones and smartwatches. It enables users to record and view their daily activities. The system could analyse these data and predict the possibility of your following sleep quality. According to previous research, we found that daily activities do affect people’s circadian and sleep outcomes. Although this phenomenon could be explained from the perspective of people’s hormonal control and behavioural rhythmicity (Dautovich et al., 2015). A dysregulation of daily behaviours would trigger young adults to have a negative sleep outcome.
Meanwhile, college students are more likely to have inadequate sleep because of multiple reasons, such as stressful study load, anxiety, and negative moods. An exciting finding shows a lot of young adults have more expects for themselves. They usually wish to accomplish more tasks. The underlying factor of that behaviour is that they would like to “extend” their day through the procrastination of sleep. However, technically, work/study efficiency doesn’t improve as they wish. Conversely, they need to sleep more than the people having a healthy lifestyle.
Additionally, research statistics show that some lifestyle factors could affect people’s Non-Restorative sleep (NRS) (Wakasugi et al., 2014). They found that unhealthy lifestyle factors, including smoking, alcohol consumption, regular exercise, and eating patterns, may cause Non-Restorative sleep.
Based on this researches, team Lemon would like to guide people to have a healthy daily lifestyle and alleviate the phenomenon people feel hard to fall asleep. Through the analysis of people’s daily activities, users could follow the instructions of the system and then conduct some activities which could help them quickly to fall asleep. The target audiences are young adults, especially college students, who feel hard to fall asleep and procrastinate to sleep. Compared to the stage we presented at the workshop, we carefully reviewed the intention of our project, and pay more attention to the lifestyle factors which cause a low-quality sleep. The most evident difference of our project to the existing offerings is we consider the triggers around the sleep, rather than the procedure of sleep itself. We want to examine more about the relationship between lifestyle factors and sleep quality.
We didn’t come up with too many ideas on how to combine social elements to our project because insomnia is an individual issue. A possible function might enable users to share their feelings with the people having the same troubles. The application is designed to work on both mobile and wearable smartwatch platforms. Compared to the application on the desktop and laptop, mobile devices (including intelligent phones and smartwatch) are more portable. Users could visualise their daily activities encompassing the items that could help them have a good sleep and could trigger them hard to fall asleep.
Following items are the lifestyle factors which we want to collect:
- Get-up time
- Start working time
- Coffee, cigarettes, alcohol daily intake
- Regular daily exercise
- Dinner (time, type, etc.)
My strengths should be serious and responsible. If I want to do something, I will be motivated to do it well. Because I feel that if this is unavoidable and takes time, and it is more meaningful to treat this task seriously than perfunctory. As a team leader, I hope that every member of my team can think so, even if we may have some skills that are not as good as others, this attitude can exceed everything. As for the technical, I am familiar with the prototype design process and related software.
My weakness may be that the position in the team discussion is not firm. When team members discuss the project plan, it is inevitable that different ideas will appear. If these ideas are not conclusive, it will take a lot of time to stand still. At this time, the team leader needs to make a decision. However, I am hesitant most of the time, so sometimes, the team's work efficiency may not be so high. The ability to think independently can be improved. As for the technical, my programming ability is very weak.
Learning through this semester project, my aspirations are team members can learn from each other and collaborate efficiently. From the early exploration and discovery of the domain to the mid-term survey of users to the production of the prototype, I hope that each team member can participate in it and gain knowledge. My goal for this course is to work together on a product with excellent user experience.
Strength:
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Familiar with prototyping tools, such as XD, Axure, could produce a functional and interactive prototype
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A clear design logic from a holistic perspective
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A pragmatist, consider product’s functions and technical implementation
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Foundations of coding, including C, Python, Java, Unity, basic frontend technologies experience
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Have experience of AR (Augmented Reality)
I like exploring new technologies and apply them when designing products. I think a professional designer needs to consider the technical feasibility and have the empathy to the coders' cause designer cannot be an idealist. I will be responsible for my project and contribute my best, although I know I cannot force others to follow my criteria and standard. My communication ability is fine, I think we could learn a lot through conversations with others having different backgrounds, and each product’s evaluation/iteration procedures are more important than offerings themselves.
Weakness:
Sometimes I feel a little difficult to visualise my ideas and draw them clearly, and it could be an obstacle to express and explain my designs to others. I could imagine that in the following designing procedure, our team needs to make some product sketches, so this is what I want to learn from my team members.
Hope to achieve:
My expects of this course is to deliver a functional minimum viable product, design a horizontal product prototype with multiple features and functions. Then create a vertical prototype to test the feasibility of our project.
Strength：
- Expertise in various object-oriented programming languages, also involving SQL and PHP.
- Understand a variety of binary classification algorithms and filtering algorithms. These algorithms are helpful for developing our projects and achieving our desired functionalities.
- Have learned much design experience. Meanwhile, I understand we should design user-centred products.
- Understand how to provide more humanised products and help users interact with our product more efficiently.
- Understand the survey process, product design, and prototype progress.
- Positive attitude, highly motivated
- English/write with high proficiency
Weakness：
- UNITY
Currently, I am not very familiar with UNITY. This project provides me with an opportunity for using UNITY to achieve our project aim.
- Huge stress
As the last semester students, I not only have many assignments and Thesis projects but also am required to find a new supervisor for further studying. The huge amount of missions leads a lot of stress.
- Living area
Our four team members are living in different areas in Brisbane. Each team member has different course time and personal assignments. It is challenging for me having enough discussion time me our team members.
Hope to achieve：
- Insomnia-related knowledge and appropriate solution
Our team has a novel project topic, which is to focus on the insomnia of current university students. Although insomnia can be caused by many reasons, high stress should be one of the most important reasons. Thus, this topic is very close to our life and very attractive.
- Graph design and UNITY
As one of the crucial tools, UNITY plays a very important role in the design field. Thus, this is a chance for me learning and understanding how to use UNITY. In addition, there is much other development software which is helpful for our project. These aspects can also support me in improving my skills.
Strength:
Familiar with design software, such as adobe illustrator, adobe 3D max, photoshop, adobe XD, keyshot. I can use some programming, such as HTML, CSS, Python, SQL.
Have some design skills, such as hand painting, Graphic Design
Although I can design different kinds of products and use design software to achieve my design before, the interaction is also import between people and products. I want to complete this project with my group members and communicate with members who have more code skills to learn about making products more interactive for people. Today's products are becoming more and more intelligent, and interaction is becoming more and more important.
Weakness:
This class is social mobile, but code usage and knowledge are my weakness, I do not have a professional IT background. I can learn from my group members who have an IT background.
Hope to achieve:
In this course, I hope to improve the ability to design objects and connect technology and products and improve the ability to design interactive products. On the other hand, I hope that through group work, I can have more interaction with the team members and learn from them the insufficiency of their ability, such as code editing ability.
- Skills & Knowledge:
Our group contains team members who are from different Master programs. Because of that, we can apply a variety of knowledge and skills to support our project more impeccable. For example, Guangyao Li’s interest focuses on different binary algorithms, filtering algorithms and deep learning. In addition, Huiyu Jia has much experience in group organisation and brainstorming. Furthermore, Yuchen Ye not only enrolled in several different prototyping courses but also familiar with Unity, Visual Studio and much other software. At last, Yawen Deng recognised that every design should be based on user-centred. Based on these experiences, she is professional in product design and graphic design.
- Attitude:
Team Lemon is a high-morale team. Specifically, each team member collaborates with each other to keep our project on track. In addition, every team member works together and tries to provide more novel design ideas. In other words, we force our team as a positive team and with a high passion for our project. Under these attitudes, we trust we can obtain more creativity and diversity.
- Project Concept:
First, our project focuses on the insomnia of university students. In this case, our target group is very closed to our life, and it is easy for us exploring and understanding deep reasons why they have insomnia. Second, every university student under much pressure, including assignments, exams, graduation, and looking for a job. This situation is more likely to cause insomnia. Third, according to UQ fast facts, The University of Queensland currently has 53,696 students, which provides the probability for us collecting a huge amount of data and ensure the accuracy of our survey. Forth, as one of the most serious problems, insomnia can lead to a series of ripple effects. Insomnia causes not only many physiological diseases, such as diabetes, heart disease, and cancer but also has negative effects on further work and study. Meanwhile, their emotion is easier to be angry and worried. Based on these problems, we decided to do a survey for our large target group based on their insomnia and provide statistical analysis. The project will contain a product as well. It is to support uses in analysing and reducing insomnia. For achieving the “social” objective, our product is able to share information and communication between insomniacs.
- Team challenges:
Different team members are from different Master programs. Even the same program team members might have different courses. In addition, one of our team members has a part-time job on weekends. It is challenging for us to have a meeting since we live in different areas in Brisbane. The overlap course time limits us has enough meeting duration.
- Project challenges:
Insomnia can be caused by many potential reasons. Some insomniacs are owing to high pressure or poor sleep habits, while some others because of pathological reasons. Sometimes it is an even collaborative reason. However, not all target students understand the exact reasons why he/she has insomnia.
Considering our target group, students might within different sex, different study programs, different degrees, different faculties, even different living areas. All these objective factors might have potential effects on our survey results. However, we have no exact evidence of how important these factors are, and we have no specific and quantitative methods for measuring these factors.
Considering both our team strengths and challenges, the following options can support us in avoiding risks and gaining more opportunities.
Skills and knowledge options:
Each team member has their own strengths. However, each team member doesn’t have too much understanding of other’s knowledge. This is an opportunity for team members learning from each other.
- Team options:
We understand each team member have many workloads. Thus, it is necessary for us to keep communication and to allocate time appropriately. In this case, it is an opportunity for us to learn how to assign time resources and how to cooperate with team members.
- Project options:
Insomnia is a wide scope problem. We have to focus on a particular aspect of further design. It provides an opportunity for us learning how to eliminate noisy data, how to control different variates. These considerations and design can provide more well-directed product.
During the initial discussion and presentation, we received a lot of positive and constructive suggestions. Lorna suggested to us that we should focus on the impacts of behaviours which are before sleeping. This suggestion helped us recognise that we should increase the consideration of behaviours while avoiding the consideration of pathological reasons or other deeper reasons. Seb provided us with a design guideline for our project. Specifically, it is better for us thinking of the project objectives first, and then decide what techniques are most suitable for the project. According to the evaluation by Gladys, we should discuss and explore how to associate stress and daily life with sleep quality.
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