New smart glasses use AI to track health by watching you blink

Glasses that track every blink might be the next big thing in health tech. A small device called BlinkWise clips onto regular eyewear and uses AI to read your eyelid movements – without cameras, without cloud data, and without draining your battery.

It turns something as ordinary as a blink into a powerful signal about your mental and physical state.

This little tool doesn’t use video. It doesn’t need an internet connection. And it doesn’t drain battery life like most smart devices.

Instead, it quietly sends out small radio waves and watches how they bounce off your eyelids. The result? A live, highly detailed read on how you’re blinking – and what that might say about your health.

BlinkWise reads health clues

The average person blinks more than 10,000 times a day. But it’s not just how often you blink that matters. It’s how completely you blink, how long each blink lasts, and how quickly your eyelid moves.

These details, called blink dynamics, can reveal important information about fatigue, focus, eye dryness, and mental workload.

“Blinking is something we do thousands of times per day without thinking, and yet it reflects so much about our health,” said Lama Al-Aswad, one of the researchers behind the project.

“Because it’s noninvasive and easy to monitor, blink analysis could become a powerful tool for managing chronic conditions and identifying cognitive changes early.”

For example, if your eyelids are staying closed just a bit longer than usual, it could be a sign you’re too tired to drive safely.

Drowsy driving is a massive problem – it leads to thousands of crashes and costs the U.S. economy more than $100 billion every year.

On the other hand, if you’re blinking too often and not all the way, it might point to dry eye disease, which affects over 16 million people in the U.S.

Smart glasses that track blinking

Until now, if doctors or scientists wanted to study your blinking patterns, you had to sit still in front of a high-speed camera in a lab. It wasn’t practical for everyday life. BlinkWise changes that completely.

“Previous systems required a lab setup,” said Dongyin Hu, the lead author of the team’s research paper and a doctoral student in computer and information science. “BlinkWise just clips onto your glasses, so you can monitor blinks anywhere.”

That real-time model, called an eye-openness score, is more than just a simple “open or shut” report.

It draws a detailed curve of how your eyes are opening and closing in every blink – something even the fastest camera on a smartphone can’t catch.

Typical video records at 30 or 60 frames per second. BlinkWise samples data thousands of times per second.

“With radio-frequency sensors, we can sample thousands of times per second, enabling much more detailed analysis,” said Hu.

Tiny AI that works on its own

So how does BlinkWise pull this off without draining your battery or needing to connect to your phone? It runs all its AI calculations right on the device itself.

There’s no need to send data back and forth to the cloud. Everything happens locally, on a chip smaller than a postage stamp.

To do this, the team had to completely rethink how to shrink powerful AI into something that could fit on a wearable.

They adapted techniques from image processing and machine learning, redesigned the processing system from the ground up, and figured out how to deal with constant streams of signal data – all while keeping power use extremely low.

“Smart glasses have to do a lot, so we didn’t want blink tracking to drain the battery or take up too much computing power,” said Insup Lee, director of the Penn Research in Embedded Computing and Integrated Systems (PRECISE) Center.

BlinkWise smart glasses understand you

“Today’s smart glasses can take photos or play audio, but they don’t really understand the wearer,” said Mingmin Zhao, assistant professor of computer and information science and one of the lead researchers on the project.

“We believe devices like BlinkWise are the first step toward eyewear that responds to your cognitive state, not just your voice commands.”

Glasses also have a key advantage over phones or smartwatches: they sit right in front of your eyes, making them the perfect place to monitor what your brain and body are doing – silently and accurately.

“We see BlinkWise not just as a health monitor, but as a building block for glasses that are truly intelligent.”

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