Masters Theses

Date of Award

5-2023

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Electrical Engineering

Major Professor

Dan D. Wilson

Committee Members

Seddik M. Djouadi, Amir Sadovnik

Abstract

Commercial air travel has become extremely commonplace in the last 20 to 30 years especially as the world has moved towards new heights of globalization. Though air travel has greatly reduced transit times allowing people to cover thousand of miles within hours, it comes with its fair share of issues. jet-lag can be regarded to be at the top of those list of problems; jet-lag typically results from rapid travel through multiple time zones which causes a significant misalignment between the person's internal circadian clock and the external time. A person's circadian clock is governed by a population of coupled neurons entrained to a 24-hour light and dark cycle and thus after rapid air travel, the neuron population needs a certain time to get accustomed to the new time zone. This misalignment can result in a variety of health problems including, but not limited to, lethargy, insomnia and adverse effects to the sleep cycle.

Various techniques have been proposed and are currently in use for jet-lag treatment like melatonin ingestion or making drastic changes to one's own routine prior to air travel. However, these treatment strategies are normally accompanied with long re-entrainment times or following a strict schedule to help with correcting the sleep cycle. The presented work explores an alternate strategy for jet-lag treatment using the notion of operational phase and isostable coordinates for model reduction and then, applying optimal control to derive inputs which can be applied directly to the model. To show the framework's efficacy, results are presented by applying the strategy to a 2-d model; preliminary results show that the proposed approach greatly reduces the reentrainment time required to acclimatize to the new time zone.

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