• Current opened records

  • BL!NK: Detecting, Storing and Analysing Eye Blinks

Awards
Author(s):
Category:
Institution:
Region:
Winner Category:
Year:
Abstract:
  • In a world consisting of a rapidly ageing population, health monitoring and healthcare delivery are becoming important concerns. The benefits of early diagnosis and intervention with regards to age related health issues are key to helping people live healthy and productive lives. Two of the most significant age-related disorders are Parkinson’s Disease and Alzheimer’s, both of which are difficult to diagnose and monitor on a long term basis. This multidisciplinary project seeks to establish a first step towards better diagnosis and monitoring by utilising 2D materials, such as graphene, to construct wearable sensors that can be linked to low cost micro-controllers for continuous and unobtrusive monitoring. In doing so, it unites the fields of neuroscience, computer science and 2D materials. The project first establishes the requirements for the overarching work it intends to complete and then surveys existing work on eye blinking, Parkinson’s Disease and applications of 2D materials for human motion monitoring. It then successfully goes on to build an end to end system that can detect synthetic eye blinks, analyse the raw data and present it in an intuitive manner for physicians to use. These results provide a successful proof of concept for the application of 2D materials towards monitoring neurodegenerative diseases. Lastly, it suggests promising paths to take to make such devices more effective and clinically acceptable.