🚀 go-pugleaf

stansbury-travis@yale.edu (Travis Stansbury) writes:

>Net-scepticism aside, this IS sci.electronics, and since I think most of
>would agree that a cool grand is a little spendy for a pair 'o flashig
>goggles, how would one actually construct this particular beast.  I've
>read the swim-goggle shotgun idea (and think it sounds pretty logical),

What is the swim-goggle "shotgun" idea -- just bombard you with the LED
flashes every 30 minutes or so?

>but what if one wanted to really make a pair that detected REM sleep
>before triggering the LED's - how hard would this be, and does it
>involve enough complex circuitry to warrant a $1000 price tag?

I recall reading somewhere that the reason it's so expensive is that
it's adaptible and configurable.  You can set the length of the
flashes and some other parameters that I can't remember right now.

I believe (does anyone know?) that the DreamLight detects REMs via
a physical sensor mounted on the eyelids during sleep.  If you close
your eyes and hold your finger lightly against your closed eyelid,
you'll feel when you move your eye around, since your cornea protrudes
a bit from the rest of the eyeball.  A sensitive switch or pad of
some sort could detect this.

If this is indeed the way the DreamLight works, then some sort of
software would be needed to decide when your eye movements actually
indicate REM sleep and when they just indicate regular eye movements.
If you have a PC (not necessarily IBM, just a computer), it seems to me
that it would be conceptually trivial to feed the signals from
the eye-movement-detector into the PC, then have the PC control the
flashes, etc. (all the tweaking about timing, sensitivity threshhold,
etc would be controlled through software).

My question:  what sort of a sensor would be delicate enough to detect
the slight bulge of the cornea moving around beneath the closed eyelid,
without causing uncomfortable pressure on the eye?

Norman
norlin@mailhost.ecn.uoknor.edu