New Computer Program Designed to Help Weary Travelers Battle Jet Lag

If you’re a globe-trotting business executive, you’re probably convinced by the weight on your eyelids alone that the curse of jet lag seems as inevitable as death and taxes.

But wait a minute, what’s this?

TimeZone, a start-up software company led by husband-and-wife software industry veterans Alan and Helen Cameron, sells a software program that it maintains helps travelers reduce the travel-related fatigue and disorientation known as jet lag.

“We travel a lot and we’ve become firsthand experts on jet lag,” said Helen Cameron, who is the Irvine School Board president and chief executive of Irvine-based State Space Systems Inc., a computer forecasting company. “We finally decided to create the program after we took three trips to Australia last year.”

With TimeZone, the user types in a travel schedule to any one of 400 destinations worldwide. The program calculates the number of time zones that would be crossed in the trip and generates a custom plan for a sleep, diet and activity schedule that the Camerons say can reduce the effects of jet lag.

For instance, on a typical trip from Orange County to New York the program recommends an early dinner with caffeine and sleep at 8 p.m. (11 p.m. EST) after arriving in New York and at least five hours of sunlight the next day.

The program runs on IBM-compatible personal computers and requires 720 kilobytes of main memory. The program disks can be used on most laptop computers and a printout of a typical schedule can fit in an airline ticket pouch.

The Camerons are betting that bleary-eyed travelers, who they say can lose a day of productivity for each time zone crossed as a result of jet lag, will consider the product well worth the $199 price.

“As the economy becomes more global, jet lag is a major productivity problem for travelers,” said Alan Cameron, whose previous ventures include founding a mainframe software company, Mega Group Inc., which he sold to Computer Associates in 1986. “It can be a significant cost for companies.”

Renata Shafor, medical director of the San Diego Sleep Disorder Center, said jet lag can be so severe that she recommends travelers not make any business decisions on the same day they have taken a long trip.

“I haven’t seen this program, but overall there are general rules that would be helpful for the majority of people to avoid jet lag,” Shafor said. “Some people will always need special attention.”

The Camerons say that TimeZone isn’t a miracle cure for jet lag.

“It helps you avoid or reduce it, not eliminate it,” Alan Cameron said. “In the real world, you can’t follow a rigid, scientific schedule.”

He said the formula that drives the program is adapted from initial jet-lag research done at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and Harvard University as well as other existing research.

Molded from the research, the TimeZone formula assumes the severity of jet lag is determined by the direction of travel, a person’s regular sleep schedule and the number of time zones crossed in a trip. It also assumes the person’s intake of sunlight or room light alone can reset his or her body’s biological clock, and low-calorie and high-calorie meals can help adjust the body clock.

Charles Czeisler, a researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said he does not endorse the TimeZone product.

“I find it shocking somebody would take an initial finding like this and--without research in this area--attempt to market the product on an unsuspecting public,” he said. “Such a product, if it has not been tested, is premature.”

Czeisler said an analysis of TimeZone’s recommendations for a trip from Orange County to Tokyo showed the program has no correlation to his own research.

“The connection between my work and his program is not sophisticated enough to be accurate,” he said.

Alan Cameron said in response that TimeZone is not providing any medical advice or treating sleep disorders. He said the schedules recommend only how business travelers should adjust their normal schedules to reduce jet lag.

Samuel Potolicchio, director of the Sleep Disorder Center at Georgetown University, said that systems preventing jet lag have been around for years and they can work on a general level.

“But then there are always problems with cookbook approaches, because problems with sleep are multifaceted and any solution should take into account things like age,” Potolicchio said. “This is not a bad idea and it would probably help people to some degree.”

Marie Coleman, a travel consultant in La Palma, said the software worked well for her husband, Ron, on a recent trip to Australia.

“He said it worked well,” she said. “I don’t think there is any cure for jet lag, but there are things you can do to help you suffer less.”

The Camerons hope to find resellers to market the software, but they are also directly targeting travel agencies and business executives. They are considering issuing more sophisticated programs that can calculate schedules on complicated, multileg trips.