College senior Tyler Skluzacek and his team created a sleep tracking app for soldiers with PTSD, as reported by NBC News.
Wanting to help his father, Tyler and his friends Damola, Sarah, Brian and Sravya, entered a computer programming contest, called HackDC. His team, called “The Cure,” spent thirty-six hours writing code, and created an app for smartwatches that they named “myBivy.”
“Bivy” is short for “bivouac,” a military term for a safe place to sleep.
The app tracks sleeping patterns for soldiers and searches for symptoms of the onset of panic attacks. The app will then use sound or vibrations “to disrupt that or take them out of the deep sleep but keep them asleep.”
“It needs to learn how to stop a sleep terror without ever waking up a soldier,” the young Skluzacek told NBC News on Thursday.
In the HackDC competition, myBivy earned the top prize of $1500. Tyler said he and his team currently have one completely functional prototype on the Pebble Time smartwatch and Android smartphone. The group is raising money on Kickstarter to develop the app for wider use and hope to start clinical testing early next year.
