ArouseAndroidMuse

Inspiration

We all know there are times when you nod your head off and jolt up. You're dosing off, and that's because you're trying your best to fight stage 2 sleep. We all have those times when we desperately try to stay awake. While studying at home, listening to a lecture, or even while driving. That's why we created Arouse for Muse.

What it does

The Muse, for all who don't know, is a headband that reads the electrical signals generated from your brain, and sends that data via bluetooth to your device. Muse sends it to our Arouse app, and Arouse analyzes theta waves (brain waves most associated to light sleep/daydreaming) from the data. If you are dosing off, the readings from your brain drop, and it will send out a notification to wake you up.

How I built it

Using the MuseLib API in Android Studio, we decided to only monitor the signals coming from near the left ear, since the hippocampus responsible for sleep is closest to it.

Challenges I ran into

A small thing was that the only Android versions compatable with Muse was 5.1 and above. Only one of our phones worked, so all the coding/debugging was done on one computer. It was also a challenge configuring what the Theta brainwave values that the Muse gives to the app actually meant. We couldn't find information on units in the documentation.

Accomplishments that I'm proud of

I had never coded JAVA or in Android Studio in my entire life. I didn't expect the first 6 hours of my first hackathon to be spent downloading APIs, drivers, and configuring the hardware for development, or to even be done with a working prototype in my first hackathon.