Recent advances in wearable sensing and mobile computing have opened up unprecedented opportunities to improve people’s health. They can quantify dynamic changes in an individual’s health state as well as key physical, biological, behavioral, social, and environmental factors that contribute to health and disease risk, anytime and anywhere. Such real-time monitoring can optimize care delivery via delivering just-in-time mobile health (mHealth) interventions. Although timely interventions have been a hallmark of computing systems (e.g., recovering from failures in computing systems), designing timely mHealth interventions presents unique challenges. Even after a century of health research, we still lack mathematical models of human health and its interactions with the environment. A major hurdle is the lack of high-resolution data on changes in the health states and the associated risk factors of individuals collected in their natural environment. Compounding the problem is wide personal and situational diversity that necessitates contextualization and personalization. These challenges, however, constitute exciting transdisciplinary research agenda, which, if successful, can have a tremendous impact on the human society. This talk will describe the progress we have made towards the design of sensor-triggered just-in-time mHealth interventions for addressing stress and addictive behaviors.
 
Bio:
Santosh Kumar is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Memphis. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Ohio State University in 2006, where his dissertation won presidential fellowship. In 2010, the Popular Science magazine named him one of America’s ten most brilliant scientists under the age of 38 (called “Brilliant Ten”) for leading the AutoWitness GPS-less burglar tracking project and AutoSense wearable sensor project for mobile measurement of stress and addictive behaviors. He received Early Career Research award in 2008, Alumni Association Distinguished Research award in 2013, and “Eye of the Tiger” award in 2014 from University of Memphis. He is known for his theory works on coverage and connectivity in wireless sensor networks. His current research interests include mobile sensor systems and mobile health (mHealth). He is currently director of the recently awarded NIH Center of Excellence in Mobile Sensor Data-to-Knowledge (MD2K) that involves 20+ investigators in computing, engineering, behavioral science, and medicine from 11 institutions.