CAREER: Data Representation and Modeling for Unleashing the Potential of Multi-Modal Wearable Sensing Systems

The recent increase in the variety and usage of wearable sensing systems allows for the continuous monitoring of health and wellness of users. The output of these systems enable individuals to make changes to their personal routines in order to minimize exposures to pollutants and maintain healthy levels of exercise. Furthermore, medical practitioners are using these systems to monitor proper activity levels for rehabilitation purposes and to monitor threatening conditions such as heart arrhythmias.
However, there is substantial work to be done to facilitate the processing and interpretation of such information in order to maximize impact. This proposal develops a computational framework that models the complex interactions between physiological and environmental factors contributing to an individual's health. The contributions of this award will facilitate the broad adoption of wearable sensing platforms and innovative analytical tools by individuals and medical practitioners.

This award develops methodology for the estimation and prediction of physiological responses and environmental factors, with the objective of enabling users to efficiently change their behavior. To accomplish this objective, the framework will build on tools from statistical analysis, topological data analysis, optimization theory and human behavior analysis. This novel framework will not only develop new formal techniques, but it will also serve as a bridge between these cross-disciplinary fields. In particular, the proposed hierarchical computational framework has the potential of providing a trade-off between accuracy and computational flexibility based on the choice of granularity of the representation. This award will: (1) develop methodology for the concurrent representation of physiological, kinematic and environmental states for inference purposes; (2) develop techniques for mapping representations between different systems to enable information sharing; and (3) develop techniques to maximize the impact on the behavior of individuals by building on the proposed data representation. The algorithm development will be informed by integration of limitations on embedded platforms due to memory, computational and power capabilities, and transmission costs when off-board processing is required.

The proposed techniques will empower users and medical practitioners to understand, analyze, and make decisions based on patterns in the data. The outcomes of this project will empower medical practitioners by providing innovative and effective tools for wearable sensing systems which enable efficient pattern identification, data representation and visualization. Besides training students directly working on this project, the data sets and algorithms developed will be incorporated into a new graduate course on computational techniques for physiological and environmental sensing.
Undergraduate students will be engaged by participating in data collection experiments, REUs, and local demonstrations. Underrepresented undergraduate student communities will be exposed to the research at the national level by presenting demos at well-known diversity conferences in the STEM fields.
Furthermore, K-12 local student communities will be engaged via summer workshops that will be prepared for students and educators.