Patent 7898426 was granted and assigned to Toyota Motor Engineering & Manufacturing North America on March, 2011 by the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
Example apparatus and methods for estimating a living being's alertness include modeling the sleep-wake cycle using a function generator circuit to model the circadian component, and one or more analog circuits to model the homeostatic and inertial components. In some embodiments of the present invention, temporal scaling is used for more rapid modeling, for example using time periods of seconds or less to represent an hour of the sleep-wake cycle.