Dreams are fascinating personally, therapeutically, and scientifically. Who hasn't woken up in the morning and wondered how they came up with that wild story, and what it could reveal? But studying dreams is limited by the expensive technology used to track the sleep stages in which they occur. Masca is a flexible mask designed for easier, cheaper sleep stage detection. Our device is designed for eyelid motion detection, and adapts to the human body using conformable piezoresistive fabric and silicone to see the various physiological changes occurring as sleep states change without the need for wired amplifiers or sticky electrodes.

Mental activity in REM sleep is crucial for long-term-potentiation of learning and memory. Tracking and influencing of REM sleep mentation opens up doors to augmentation of memory and learning: a future in which the content and consolidation of cognition in sleep is rendered controllable by wearable electronics. Our vision is a democratized dream science, wherein people can try out all the laboratory protocols for lucid or therapeutic dreams  in the comfort of their own home. We show that Masca offers reliable detection of head and eye movement, offering a new sleep wearable for interfacing with the REM state and influencing dream content.

This project was led by Adam Horowitz, Oscar Rosello, and Tomas Vega of Fluid Interfaces Group, MIT Media Lab.

Project Report Masca: A Flexible Sleep Mask for Rapid Eye Movement (REM) Detection and Electrical Muscle Stimulation (EMS) Intervention

Installation Dream Engineering: Ars Electronica, 2018.

Coverage Core77

Photo Credit: Oscar Rosello, MIT Media Lab.