See UV on Your Skin: An Ultraviolet Sensing and Visualization System

These days, as the Earth’s protective ozone layer gets thinner, ultraviolet (UV) radiation threat is growing. In addition, getting tanned as a fashion leads people to wear less clothing, which increases UV intake. Excessive exposure to ultraviolet will lead to sunburn and even skin cancer. Therefore, neither insufficient nor excessive exposure is desirable. Although there are tons of UV meters on the market, a user may have a hard time to understand the unintuitive UV index reading. Thus, there is a potential demand for a portable system which can keep track of daily UV exposure dose, visualize possible sunburned consequences, and provide appropriate skin care recommendations. In this paper, we present a personalized UV monitoring and notification system. This system can continuously track UV exposure by wearable UV sensors. It can also visualize the cumulative UV exposure dose according to a predictive sunburned skin color model. Such an augmented skin color can provide a warning message to indicate the possible result of continuous UV exposure. Compared with other existing systems, our solution not only allows users to monitor their daily UV exposure, but also provides an unobtrusive UV visualization model which effectively warns users to take appropriate actions to avoid potential skin damage. The system has been tested on 9 subjects, and the evaluation feedback indicates that our system is promising for UV monitoring and sunburn prevention.