Research
Research Groups> Personal Health Informatics
Timothy Bickmore Timothy Bickmore Harriet Fell Harriet Fell Mathew Goodwin Mathew Goodwin Stephen Intille Stephen Intille Rupal Patel Rupal PatelCCIS’s personal health informatics (PHI) group works with other faculty around Northeastern ( see the Ph.D. in Personal Health Informatics) to explore how emerging computing technology can change the way that healthcare is delivered in the U.S. and worldwide. The group approaches health technology from the perspective of the individual patient or person and investigates how advanced human-computer interaction technology can help people stay healthy, assist with hospital care and rehabilitation, and assist people with special needs.
The group’s primary research areas include health informatics, assistive technologies and interfaces, sensor-enabled computational behavioral interventions, ubiquitous computing for health and wellness, conversational agents for improving health literacy, and speech channels as input to computers used in healthcare systems.
Team Achievements
- Created software to analyze infants' babble and provide diagnostic information on whether a child may be at risk for speech-related problems;
- Created an animated virtual nurse that educates hospital patients about their health conditions and post-discharge self-care, encourages people to exercise and take medications as prescribed, and simulates face-to-face conversations between patients and healthcare professionals;
- Created a technology for measuring type, duration, and intensity of physical activity and sedentary behavior using miniature sensors and mobile phones for deployment in large-scale research studies;
- Developed technology for assisting researchers study autistic children in a classroom setting by automatically recognizing their repetitive motor movements;
- Developed technology for wirelessly recording and visualizing sypathetic nervous system functioning related to stress, arousal, anxiety, and emotion.
