Very cool! The thesis does not seem to mention blinks but they seem pretty trivial as opposed to eye position. This solution is all in hardware, mine would be all software assuming the eye and eyelid have sufficiently different IR reflectivity for a normal infraport to detect. Of course, there are many other options to implement this such as a microcontroller, some kind of character display and a teletype for non-volatile storage. Or nothing but a Morse code logger but that’s a little too dehumanizing.