This Penn-built device wakes you up when you’re dozing off

We monitor our phones and Macbooks obsessively for battery life — why not track our bodies?

That’s the idea behind Vigo, a headset built by Penn grads that “nudges” you awake when it detects that you’re tired. It’s three days away from the end of its Kickstarter campaign and has already reached its $50,000 goal (not too shabby for a device that Venturebeat called “pointless“). Jason Gui, Drew Karabinos and Jonathan Kern said that the idea for Vigo came to them at the University of Pennsylvania, where they felt tired more often than they’d like to admit.

Support Vigo here.

Vigo tracks your alertness by monitoring your blinks and your range of motion throughout the day. The device will know you are tired before you do, according to the founders. To combat drowsiness, the energy gauge can “nudge” you with a vibration, an LED notification or a song in your ear when your energy levels start to dip.

Vigo also comes with a mobile app that visualizes the highs and lows of your energy level, so you can track patterns over time.

If the Kickstarter campaign is successful, the team plans to start mass production in April, meaning that you can have your own Vigo as early as this May.

The cofounders are currently participating in San Francisco-based hardware accelerator HAXLR8R. They’ll remain in San Francisco, Gui said, because of its active hardware and software scene, plus the city’s proximity to China, where its manufacturing operations are located.

Read more on Philly.com and the Daily Pennsylvanian.