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Senior Design Project: glasses that keep you awake while you study Credit: Imran Cronk , Imran Cronk

Here’s one engineering senior design project that won’t put you to sleep.

Engineering seniors Jonathan Kern, Drew Karabinos, Jason Gui, and Blake Winston have created a pair of glasses that will wake the wearer up if he starts to doze off as their senior design project.

“For some reason a shock collar is everyone’s first thought,” said Karabinos said.

The team had to figure out how the device could sense when someone was asleep and wake them up.

The team decided to go for something less painful than a shock collar. They considered a “cold blaster” and a vibrating strap worn around the chest — like the chest strap heart rate monitors worn by runners — as options to wake someone up.

They finally came up with glasses that vibrate at the temple when the user is dozing off. They also activate an app on the wearer’s phone, which will give the user a puzzle to help him or her stay awake.

A main challenge in designing this was to create glasses that could sense when the wearer was asleep. They decided to use a system where a small amount of infrared light — which the seniors claim is not dangerous to vision — on the eye as a test for whether the user is asleep. When the eye is open, it absorbs the infrared light. When the eye is closed, the skin of the eyelid reflects the light.

Another infrared light attached to the glasses registers whether the light is being reflected or absorbed, which lets the glasses know if the eye is open or closed. According to Winston, one of four members of the team, the circuit filters out other infrared light in the room so that there’s no interference.

As the wearer falls asleep, they will keep their eyes closed longer each time they blink. By tracking the frequency and length of blinks, the glasses determine whether the wearer is nodding off.

The senior design program is a capstone project for all students who are pursuing a bachelor’s degree in Engineering. Students are supposed to apply what they have learned in class to make a functioning device.

“The senior design program is designed to give students exposure to the entire process of conceiving and designing and building an engineering product,” said Patrick McGinnis, a lecturer in the Mechanical Engineering and Applied Mechanics Department who leads the senior design program in the department.

According to Jason Gui, another member of the team, each team member had taken different classes in the department and brought unique skills to the project. Gui took a class which taught him how to program the microcontroller for the glasses.

The projects also require the student to seek information from outside of their major.

“Working with code isn’t our specialty, and we needed to code in Android,” said Gui, so the team learned to code an Android app.

The team also researched the anatomy of a blink when programming the glasses.

“What is a blink? We thought of it in [the] terms of a mechanical engineer,” said Karabinos. “Your eye closes a lot faster than your eye opens. That pattern becomes more distinct as you fall asleep.”

According to Winston, the glasses would have applications beyond helping a sleep-deprived student pull an all-nighter. Security guards and drivers could use the glasses to stay awake and alert instead of having to resort to an energy drink or caffeine pills.

“We wanted to design something that is not a drug, something mechanical, to keep you awake,” he said.

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