IMDEA Networks
Towards Continuous and Unobtrusive Sensing of Health and Behavior
Deepak Ganesan, Professor, University of Massachusetts Amherst, MA, USA; Visiting Professor IMDEA Networks; Chair of Excellence University Carlos III of Madrid - Banco Santander, Spain
External Presentation (External Speaker)
Wearable sensors offer tremendous opportunities for accelerating biomedical discovery, and improving population-scale health and wellness. There is a growing appetite for health analytics – we are no longer content with wearables that count steps and calories, we want to predict disease onset, measure disease progression, and understand the role of physiology, behavior, and activities with the expectation that such data will lead to deep insights that can improve quality of life.
In this talk, I will describe some of our work on designing new wearable devices that expand our ability to sense human states, as well as methodological challenges that emerge in analyzing continuous sensor data in natural environments. I will discuss a few recent projects on the design of the next generation of digital biomarkers including smart textiles that leverage functionalized cotton threads as sensors to continuously measure physical and physiological signals, and smart eyewear that continuously measure eye movements and facial gestures to provide a window on cognitive state such as attention, fatigue, and pain. I will also briefly discuss some of the analytical methodology that can allow us to make sense from noisy, real-world data from wearables as well as our experiences with clinical trials in the context of detecting and preventing relapse for addictive behavior.
About Deepak Ganesan
Deepak Ganesan is a Professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst. He is the Director of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring at UMass Amherst, a $40 million center for fabrication of new health devices, and a thrust lead for the NIH-funded MD2K Center for Excellence on Mobile Sensor-to-Knowledge (http://md2k.org). His recent work has been recognized by Best Paper Awards and nominations at Mobicom, MobiSys, CHI and Ubicomp. In addition to academic endeavors, he is a co-founder of Lumme Inc, which is commercializing some of his work on addictive behavior detection and intervention. He is an ACM Distinguished Scientist.
This event will be conducted in English