Illustration of a person with earbuds that can detect signs of drowsiness in the brain. (Illustration by Adobe Stock and Adam Lau)Staying alert
For people whose jobs involve driving or working with heavy machinery, drowsiness can be extremely dangerous — if not outright deadly. To help people who may be drifting off, engineers led by Rikky Muller, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, have created earbuds that can detect signs of drowsiness in the brain. Postdoctoral scholar Ryan Kaveh (Ph.D.’22 EECS) and graduate student Carolyn Schwendeman (B.S.’20, M.S.’21, Ph.D.’26) collaborated with the lab of electrical engineering and computer sciences professor Ana Arias to design the final earpiece.
- The earbuds use built-in electrodes that make contact with the ear canal, similar to how an electroencephalogram (EEG) measures electrical activity in the brain.
- The earpiece incorporates multiple electrodes in a cantilevered design that applies gentle outward pressure to the ear canal.
- The signals are read out through a custom, low-power, wireless electronic interface.
- The platform detects alpha waves, brain activity that increases when you close your eyes or start to fall asleep.
- The earpieces can also detect eye blinks and the auditory steady-state response, which is the brain’s response to hearing a steady pitch.
Learn more: Dozing at the wheel? Not with these fatigue-detecting earbuds (Berkeley News); Wireless ear EEG to monitor drowsiness (Nature Communications)