Project

Smart Eyewear Research Platforms

Patrick Chwalek

Smartglasses are increasingly popular because the face is an ideal location for continuously monitoring environmental and physiological signals. Unfortunately, no standard smartglasses platforms offer easy access to physiological data.  That leaves researchers constrained by their own quick—and usually bulky—designs that make people self-conscious and uncomfortable, altering their behavior and preventing long-term naturalistic studies. We spent a summer in Shenzhen, China, learning from eyeglass manufacturers on how best to integrate sensors that track physiological events across your face, head movements, and location in a form factor that is similar to a traditional pair of glasses. From this work, we have created a set of smart eyewear platforms tailored for different applications. 

Project Captivate: a tool for researchers, a means to understand attention and engagement, and a scalable means to control responsive ecosystems.

AirSpecs: a tool to characterize environments across contexts, estimate the constituents of pollutants in the air that users inhale, and measure how well-ventilated the area around the user is.