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How fast and the degree to which the pupil of your eye responds is a standard test for alertness. It is also a good test to see how sleepy or exhausted you might be. Now, research suggests that by just measuring the pupil response alone is not enough to determine alertness and that the rate a person blinks should also be used to obtain a more precise measure of alertness. It is stated that the work could prove important in the care of people with conditions like multiple sclerosis. It might also be automated and used to monitor patients, drivers, pilots, machine operators or others.
Researchers at Tokyo Institute of Technology and their colleagues at Aichi Medical University, point out that how the pupil dilates and contracts can be a very useful way to measure a persons alertness, but previous tests have demonstrated that the precise response of the pupil doesn't correlate well with the actual degree of sleepiness before any other signs become evident. They claim that blinking subtly affects the pupil response and have now developed a brand new approach that combines pupillography with a blinking assessment.
The approach could side-step subjective assessment in a clinical situation. Moreover, it could be developed into an early-warning system to reduce workplace and road traffic accidents by alerting operators and drivers to their level of alertness before sleepiness infringes on their behavior.
The approach has been successfully tested on two groups of volunteers sleepy and not sleepy as assessed by conventional sleepiness tests (including the Stanford Sleepiness Score and the Epworth Sleepiness Scale). The results have allowed the team to produce a formula that links blink, pupillary indices and subjective sleepiness.