SleepBeta: a mobile app to improve sleep habits amongst students

Overview

Sleep, together with healthy diet and exercise, is a key pillar for a healthy lifestyle. It is important to feeling well and to performing well at university.

However, students often have unhealthy sleep habits due to stress caused by exams, leisure activities and work commitments.

Research activities

We are currently developing a new mobile app 'SleepBeta' to help students understand how their sleep impacts their wellbeing in everyday life.

SleepBeta imports sleep data from Fitbit devices and allows users to track and explore other lifestyle data, for example, how stressed they feel and how much time they spend on social media.

You will conduct a field trial of SleepBeta with students to learn how they engage with this tool and how it might impact their sleep habits.

Outcomes

The outcomes of this research will include the development of:

• an understanding of how SleepBeta impacts the sleep habits and lifestyles of students
• new ideas for helping students become more aware of their sleep and its importance for feeling well in everyday life
• a broader wellbeing initiative for QUT students to raise awareness about the importance sleep.

Skills and experience

We are looking for students with a strong background in human-computer interaction, ideally with an interest in qualitative research, participatory design, and/or prototyping.

Scholarships

You may be able to apply for a research scholarship in our annual scholarship round.

Annual scholarship round

Keywords

• human-computer interaction
• interaction design
• health informatics
• HCI4Health
• participatory design
• personal informatics
• self-tracking
• sleep-tracking
• HCI
• CSCW
• ethnography
• wearable technology

Contact

Contact Dr Bernd Ploderer at b.ploderer@qut.edu.au for more information.