SleepSync

The problem

Shift workers keep hospitals, mines, airlines and the defence force running, and their disrupted body clocks raise the risk of poor sleep, alertness failures and worse health. Almost every sleep app assumes you sleep at night. Researchers at Monash University's Turner Institute spent years developing circadian models that personalise sleep-wake advice to a worker's roster. SleepSync, commercialised by Sleep Health Systems, turns that science into an app.

What we delivered

Bowen Chang Pty Ltd provides development and support services to the SleepSync programme. Our work sits behind the app:

• The sleep-advice service. A circadian-aware API turns a worker's shifts into per-shift sleep plans with light, caffeine and alertness guidance. The mobile app calls it for its recommendations.
• A research admin console. A secure web console gives the research team a view of trial activity in the app, behind Google single sign-on and an access allowlist.
• Trial data engineering. A tested pipeline turns raw service logs and participant records into one research-ready workbook. It deduplicates and quality-checks the data, and logs every excluded row so the dataset can be audited.
• Ongoing support. Database maintenance and clean-up tooling, dependency upkeep and operational support since early 2025.

The mobile app itself — recovery score, shift calendar, sleep-stage tracking — was designed and built by the Digital Sauce team, and earlier trial builds were developed by other teams.

Engineering notes

• A TypeScript service with schema-validated inputs, containerised and run on Google Cloud Run in an Australian region.
• The admin console is a React app using Firebase Authentication and Firestore, deployed on Firebase App Hosting.
• The data pipeline is Python with automated tests, and its output is ready for spreadsheet and BI analysis.
• The outcomes above belong to the Monash research programme. They are cited from peer-reviewed papers, not presented as results of this engagement.