U-M researchers develop Entrain mobile app to reduce jet lag

A professor and graduate student at the University of Michigan, both mathematicians, have launched a mobile app focused on minimizing the effects of jet lag.

Entrain helps its travelers leverage shortcuts to getting their internal clocks on pace with their new time zones quickly and efficiently. The app is named for entrainment, which is the scientific term for synchronizing circadian rhythms with the outside hour. Entrain’s technology is based on new findings by U-M Matt Professor Daniel Forger and former U-M undergraduate student Kirill Serkh. Olivia Walch, a PhD student at U-M, created the mobile app, which launched last week.

“I took the results from the research paper and put it into app form,” Walch says.

Forger and Serkh’s research focused on the impact of light on the average person. They identify it as the strongest signal to regulate circadian rhythms. Short disruptions to light exposure from things like jet lag can cause fatigue and lowered performance. Entrain provides shortcuts to eliminating these symptoms by providing custom schedules of light and darkness, boiling down to one block of time each day when the user should seek the brightest light possible and another when you should put yourself in the dark, or at least in dim light.

“Some of the schedules are pretty easy to follow,” Walch says.

And the app has proved popular so far. “We have already had 50,000 downloads,” Walch says.

Source: Olivia Walch, co-founder of Entrain
Writer: Jon Zemke

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