MEME – Smart Glasses to Promote Healthy Habits for Knowledge Workers
Kai Kunze, Kazutaka Inoue*, Katsutoshi Masai, Yuji Uema*, Sean Shao-An Tsai,Shoya Ishimaru**, Katsuma Tanaka**, Koichi Kise**, Masahiko Inami
Graduate School of Media Design, Keio University,*J!NS Co. LTD., **Osaka Prefecture University, Sakai, Japan

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Figure 1: J!NS MEME prototype (Fig a) and application cases in ergonomics(Fig b-d). We detect bad head posture using the glasses andtranslates the on screen content according to the bad head posture (Fig. b), until the user changes to a better viewing poition (Fig. c). If auser does not blink often enough the screen becomes blured (Fig d).

1Introduction

As people use computing devices more and more -not only desktops
and laptops but also smart phones and tablets- related health risks
also increase. Two of the most common and severe issues related
to computer work are (1) the computer vision syndrome (CVS),
symptoms include eye fatigue, headaches, dry eyes, blurred visionand (2) a too steep head flexion angle often referred to as ”TextNeck” leading to headaches and in extreme cases to spinal insures.
According to medical research, users should blink often and in regular intervals (2-5 seconds) to prevent eye fatigue, dry eyes andultimately the computer vision syndrome. To prevent ”Text Neck”,
related work suggests that the user’s head should not have a flexion
angle of larger than 60◦ for over a minute.
We propose the use of our prototype smart glasses to monitor andprevent unhealthy working habits related to both issues. The glasses
can detect eye movements and blinks both using a 3 point electrodesetup as well as head motions using accelerometer and gyroscope.
We also design interactions to prevent the knowledge worker frombad habits related to CVS and Text-Neck.

2Prototype

We present an early J!NS MEME prototype, sensing eye glasses
able to detect head and eye movements [Ishimaru et al. 2015].
We implement our demonstrations with a J!NS MEME prototype
shown in Figure 1. The prototype is unobtrusive and looks close tonormal glasses. It is equipped with 3 electrodes (electrooculography) around the nose to detect eye movements and motion sensors(accelerometer and gyroscope) to detect head movement, as well asa Bluetooth LE module to stream the data to a PC, laptop, smartphone or tablet. The electrodes are sampled with over 100 Hz, themotion sensor with over 50 Hz. The prototype already has a battery runtime of over 8 hours while streaming sensor data (will bePermission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal orclassroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributedfor commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on thefirst page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For allother uses, contact the Owner/Author.
Copyright is held by the owner/author(s).
SIGGRAPH 2015 Emerging Technologies, August 09 – 13, 2015, Los Angeles, CA.
ACM 978-1-4503-3635-2/15/08.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2782782.2792491

improved). The glasses weigh 32 grams. The glasses don’t do any
advanced processing of the sensor data, the application logic is implemented on laptop, tablets or smart phones.

3Application Cases

To prevent computer vision syndrome, our system detects if a user
is not blinking for a given period of time (8 sec. in the demo system), in this case the system starts blurring the screen of the computing device until the user blinks.
To help against unhealthy head posture, we estimate the head angle using the motion sensors in the glasses. If the angle is larger
than 60◦ for longer than 40 sec., we perform a transformation of thescreen content according to the necessary angle adjustment angle
for mobile devices (e.g. smart phone or tablet), see Figure 1. We
then track the head angle and mobile device movement (with thebuild-in accelerometer). The user can only continue watching thescreen content after he adjusted his head to a better angle. For stationary devices we move the whole screen content upwards until
the user returns to a good head posture.
Overall we believe that improving the ergonomics while working
on computing devices is a perfect use case for smart glasses. In
the last years, it became popular for people with normal eyesight towear ”computer glasses” for filtering blue light. Of course, we canuse the glasses for other activities as well. We already presented
work on how to use them for tracking reading activities and to perform simple eye gestures for computer interactions.

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