Week 8: Final Integration and Testing

This week, I focused on integrating all of SafeSense’s primary components into a completely functional system. I began by connecting the real-time drowsiness detection pipeline to the alarm system. When SafeSense detects indicators of tiredness, such as EAR (eye aspect ratio) dips or aberrant head tilts, it now immediately sends a wake-up message via text-to-speech or a pre-selected song.

After completing the basic integration, I proceeded to debug the entire flow. I tried various scenarios, such as purposefully closing my eyes for a few seconds, turning my head, and even disconnecting the camera mid-session, to ensure that SafeSense could handle problems without crashing. Fixing tiny edge situations like these improved the system’s stability and demo-readiness.

I also improved the backend settings logic to ensure that user preferences—such as wake-up name, alert style, and custom messages—are properly stored to JSON files and persist across restarts. This required a lot of careful inspection to avoid overwriting data and to reload it cleanly when the program launched.

Finally, I focused on quality assurance, stress-testing SafeSense over longer sessions, fine-tuning UI feedback, and ensuring that the overall experience is smooth for the end user. With this final round of integration and polishing, SafeSense is now ready for pilot testing.

– James Gu