There’s a smartwatch app for almost everything, but very few are useful to the men and women who work in microgravity.

So NASA is asking the pubic to design a smartwatch app for its astronauts to do everything from keeping them organized during science experiments to alerting them to space debris approaching.

NASA and Freelancer.com are sponsoring the contest, which has a $1,500 price for the best app design. More and more, NASA is relying on crowdsourcing for everything from searching for planetary bodies and the naming of stars and moon craters to proposals for housing space explorers on Mars.

Apple, however, is scrubbed from this mission. NASA is asking that designers use the Samsung Gear 2 as a reference.

The app will need a timeline application that displays calendars and agendas with the ability to easily navigate to other days past or future. It should also have a communication status application that displays whether or not the vehicle is able to communicate with the ground via voice or video.

It must also feature a caution and warnings function with color coded messages. The app must also include timers for procedures and notifications on when to begin the next activity.

All of these features must be in a single app.

Freelancer.com has more than 16 million members and judging by the number of questions in the comment section below the announcement of the contest, there is great interest.

“We are looking for freelancers to do a little bit work to figure out what these tools are, how they work, and how they would be applied to the smartwatch UI,” read NASA’s response to some of the questions. “We are not looking for spec implementation, but creative user interface conceptualization with novel approaches to using the small screen to communicate what traditionally has taken much larger display real estate.”

The astronauts currently rely on laptops and iPads for the functions that would be served by a smartwatch app.

Source: The Verge