SkyZen App: Monitor Sleep and Movement As You Fly

Apex Insight: IATA’s SkyZen app blends sleep, movement and flight data to help passengers monitor and optimize their health directly from their wrist.

When you get off that long-haul flight, how do you feel? Well-rested, or perhaps a bit… frazzled? Now that we’re in the age of wearable computing, we can move beyond the anecdotal (and sometimes hyperbolic) and get at that sweet, sweet data.

Meet IATA’s SkyZen, which leverages your iPhone and Jawbone UP wristband to monitor your biometrics and match them against travel data.

Imagine a typical travel day: from hitting snooze too many times, to racing for the train, to inching through security, to sipping a coffee before boarding, to jockeying for the armrest, to that weird non-time when the entire cabin is dark and you could swear you’re the only one awake, to the moment you land and clear customs… it feels as if a week has passed, but what was your body actually doing?

Now you can use SkyZen to review exactly how much sleep you were able to get, and how much you moved around once the seatbelt light switched off. Go even deeper and find out how your sleep patterns held up before and after the actual travel event.

Maybe it will turn out that you have fitful nights before those early-morning flights, and that’s why you feel so run-down when you reach your destination. Hey, maybe you’re one of those rare unicorns who thrive on the red-eye.

In a nutshell, SkyZen wants to help passengers fly better.

Here’s Tim Grosser, IATA’s Head of Digital Transformation, discussing SkyZen at the 71st IATA AGM in Miami.

“Recent advances in personal health monitoring give air travelers a great opportunity to track how they respond to the various stages of a trip. With its global perspective on the air transport industry, IATA is uniquely placed to develop a single app, which passengers can use across all flights, anywhere in the world. We are confident SkyZen delivers a completely new perspective on travel for passengers, with handy tips offering a fun and interactive way to improve the quality of their flying experience,” said Tom Windmuller, IATA senior vice president for Airport, Passenger, Cargo and Security in a press release.

So far, SkyZen is an iPhone-only affair. Grosser said that the next step will be rolling SkyZen onto Fitbit and the Apple Watch through iOS. An Android version is also in the pipeline.

The future is wearable, as we learned at CES earlier this year. It’s exciting to see more tools for passengers to use in taking charge of their own journeys.