“Was like a beach...just looking at them, the rocks...I can see my feet...I had a small image of running in a field. And then feeling the grass hit on my feet.”
Masca is a low-cost, flexible mask for sleep stage detection. Our device adapts to the human body using conformable piezoresistive fabric and silicone, enabling eyelid motion detection in a comfortable, affordable form. Eyes and eyelids change movement frequency predictably as sleep stage transitions occur, allowing for a simpler, more portable system than the typical high-density EEG required for sleep tracking. In addition, tracking and influencing sleep cognition open doors to targeted reactivation of daytime experience during sleep: a future in which the consolidation of emotion, memory, and learning in sleep is rendered controllable by wearable electronics.
Masca is part of the Engineering Dreams initiative we started at Fluid Interfaces at the MIT Media Lab.