Pyeongchang, South Korea, is 14 hours ahead of Toronto. So an engineer in Canada’s largest city created a solution to help the country’s Olympic athletes avert the tiring effects of jet lag.
The engineer, Amol Rao, founded startup company Somnitude and developed a pair of glasses designed to filter out blue light and aptly called Blue Block Glasses, Toronto’s Metro News reported. Jet lag from the over 13-hour flight can wear the athletes down when the most need sleep — ahead of competing in their events.
“Our main goal is to help people sleep, something that is especially important for elite athletes,” Rao told the University of Toronto Engineering. He is a master’s student studying industrial engineering at the university.
The glasses are designed to block out the blue light that is emitted by electronics and other sources and has been proven to be disruptive to humans’ natural sleep patterns, according to the school. It is suggested that people wear the glasses two to three hours before going to bed.
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To help Team Canada, Rao worked out a deal with Freestyle Canada, a program for freestyle ski training, to outfit the team’s freestyle skiers with 30 pairs of Blue Block Glasses, according to the school.
Rao added: “We hope it helps them get that extra boost, that extra fraction of a second to win a medal.”
In a further effort to help the athletes counter jet lag, Somnitude released in January an app called Chronoshift. Before the athletes wore the glasses either at home or in the Olympic Village, they could get themselves accustomed to a South Korean schedule by entering where they’re coming from and going to. An algorithm takes it from there, creating sleep and wake times for maximum rest and effectiveness during competition, using the glasses to promote the changes.
The algorithm also allows the athletes — and other users — to adjust their Circadian rhythms and receive suggestions about when to eat, when to train, and when and how to avoid sources of light.
According to the Metro News, Rao will monitor the sleep data for Team Canada’s freestyle skiers for six months after the Olympics. If Somnitude’s glasses and the Chronoshift app are successful, he told the University of Toronto that he hopes to partner with other organizations to outfit athletes in the Summer Olympics.