| Slimebeast said: Yes, the detection would be to simply monitor the twitching eye movements during REM. |
Yes, I'm sceptical Kinect's infrared sensor is capable of that. First of all, since the eyes are closed during sleep, it wouldn't see the actual iris moving, but only very small changes on the eyelids. A true PIR sensor just millimeters before the eyes is probably capable of detecting this, but an infrared camera (that probably even has a much lower resolution than the HD resolution of the RGB sensor) positioned meters away... that seems much harder to detect.
And then there's of course the problem of where to place the Kinect sensor, for it would have to see the eyes at any time. The only position I can think of where the camera would be able to see at least one eye at almost all times would be right above the bed.
My first speculation by the way was that he was thinking of that new "pulse detection" feature Kinect 2's software library is said to allow for. The Wikipedia page on REM sleep says that during this phase also one's pulse changes, so that might eventually work, at least in theory. But considering that this feature will probably not be very accurate and the changes in pulse during REM sleep might be rather small, I'm sceptical about this approach as well.
