Entrain is an app designed by mathematicians at the University of Michigan and Yale University to minimize the effects of jetlag. They've released the app for free so that folks like us can try it out and help perfect it.
When your circadian clock is out of sync with your specific location's day and night cycles, your body, and your sleep, suffers. But when your circadian clock is "entrained," it matches up with your location's natural light cycles. Entrain (the app) works by providing you with a personally tailored "light exposure schedule," based on mathematical models that factor in the light and dark cycles of your destination and point of origin. These models were created by biological mathematician Daniel Forger (a paper describing his research was published in last week's issue of PLOS), and, in theory, can help you recover from jetlag more rapidly than you would just by going about your daily life.
In fact, says Olivia Walch, a PhD student at the University of Michigan who designed the app, "these are the fastest schedules that have ever been proposed. Our schedule takes what could be 12 days of adjusting down to four."
Walch's claim is backed up by Forger's study, but he says that "what real people are doing outside of a sleep lab environment could be very different." To find out if people can benefit from tailored light exposure schedules in the real world, they're released Entrain to the public free of charge. If you want to help them out, you can opt to send your data and feedback back to Forger via the app.
Read more about the app at The University of Michigan. Download it for yourself here.
Ht LA Times