FocusFlow: A Real-Time Engagement System Enabled by Client-Side Inference

Passive video consumption is a primary cause of student disengagement in online education. To address this, we developed FocusFlow, a web platform that transforms video lectures into an interactive experience. FocusFlow uses AI to monitor student engagement in real-time and intervenes with context-aware, AI-generated quizzes when it detects a drop in focus. The effectiveness of such a system hinges on its ability to provide immediate feedback, which poses a significant systems challenge. This paper presents the FocusFlow system, its features, and the critical architectural decision-offloading inference to the client-that makes its real-time capabilities possible.