Experimental Android App Determines Alertness By Examining Eyes

An experimental new Android app developed by a team at Cornell University is designed to determine a person's alertness by examining their eyes. The app, called AlertnessScanner, utilizes a smartphone's front-facing camera to gauge the size of users' pupils. "When we're in an alert state, our sympathetic nervous system causes our pupils to dilate so that we can take in information more easily," reports New Atlas. "On the other hand, when we're tired, our parasympathetic nervous system causes our pupils to contract." From the report: In an initial study, test subjects were prompted to use the app to manually take photos of their pupils, once every three hours. Additionally, six times a day they completed a five-minute phone-based Psychomotor Vigilance Test (PVT), which is an established method of gauging reaction time. When the results of the two alertness-testing methods were compared, they were found to be very similar. That said, it was determined that most people wouldn't like having to make a point of using the app so many times every day. Additionally, in order to properly image the test subjects' pupils, the infrared filters of the phones' cameras had to be removed. The researchers managed to address these problems by changing it so that the app automatically takes a one-second-long burst of 30 pupil photos whenever users unlock their phones; and using a larger 13-megapixel front-facing camera.

Re:

[Darinbob]

This probably won't work for me, since I keep my eyes closed while at work.

A good hit from that bong

[Anonymous Coward]

and your pupils will be wide open.

Progress never stops...

[Nemosoft Unv.]

So now I need a phone to tell me I'm tired? Wow, that's some serious progress.

Re: Progress never stops...

[negRo_slim]

Pretty sure the Galaxy S4 could tell if your looking at the screen so as to turn it off or not. So this is basically already in existence... On an S4? But hey cool "invention" right?

I'm reminded of this ...

[CaptainDork]

... story [slashdot.org].

A high school in Hangzhou City, Zhejiang Province located on the eastern coast of China, has employed facial recognition technology to monitor students' attentiveness in class, local media reports.

pupils ?

[religionofpeas]

causes our pupils to dilate so that we can take in information more easily.

What ? How does that work exactly ? Bigger hole = more bandwidth ?

Re:

[burningcpu]

The pupils expand and contract to regulate the amount of light hitting the sensor. A fuzzier image is produced if the brain ratchets up the gain to the sensor, rather than adjusting the incoming light.

A fuzzier image requires more processing power to parse.

Re:

[religionofpeas]

If bigger pupil is better, why aren't they always big ?

Anybody with some experience in photography knows that bigger pupil/aperture results in fuzzier image. You lose depth of field. Also, the further you go out to the edge of the lens, the more distortion and aberration you get. On the other hand, tiny aperture is also bad because of diffraction effects.

Re:

[burningcpu]

Ok, but when is that 'rule' not the case? In low light conditions, where you either have no sensor response with low gain and low aperture, blurry sensor response with high gain and low aperture, or a middle ground.

Re:

[religionofpeas]

Sure, but in low light conditions, pupil is already maximally dilated, even when not in an alert state.

The point is that it doesn't make sense for pupil to be in suboptimal state when not alert. It doesn't cost anything.

Advertising

[olsmeister]

How long until someone decides it would be a good idea for the phone to monitor your pupil size and correlate that with which ads are viewed on the screen and phones home about which ads elicited a response in order to 'provide you with more relevant offers.'

Re:

[KiloByte]

LMDDGTFY [duckduckgo.com]. Already done, log ago.