Please join us for the Information Science Colloquium with guest, Deborah Estrin, Professor of Computer Science, Cornell NYC Tech. Deborah Estrin was hired as the first NYC Tech Campus faculty member in Computer Science. Estrin is the founding director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing and was a faculty member of the department of computer science at UCLA. Read more about Estrin's new role at Cornell's NYC Tech Campus on the Chronicle Online.

Title: Mobile Health (mHealth): from smart phone apps and sensor streams to behavioral biomarkers  

Abstract: The most significant health and wellness challenges increasingly involve multiple chronic conditions, from diabetes, hypertension, and asthma to depression, chronic-pain, sleep and neurological disorders. The promise of mobile health (mHealth) is that we can leverage the power and ubiquity of mobile and cloud technologies to monitor and understand symptoms, side effects and treatment outside the clinical setting, thereby closing the feedback loops of self-care, clinical-care, and personal-evidence-creation. However, to realize this promise, we must develop new data capture, processing and modeling techniques to convert the 'digital exhaust' emitted by mobile phone use into behavioral biomarkers. This calls for the sort of modular layered processing framework used in speech and vision in which low level state classifications of raw data (e.g., estimated activity states such as sitting, walking, driving from continuous accelerometer and location traces), are used to derive mid-level semantic features (e.g., total number of ambulatory minutes, number of hours spent out of house), that can then be mapped to particular behavioral biomarkers for specific diseases (e.g., chronic pain, GI disfunction, MS, fatigue, depression, etc). This talk will present our experiences to date with mHealth pilots and prototypes including areas most in need of further exploration: analysis and visualization (sense-making) across diverse data streams, standardizing measures and methods, an open modular architecture to promote innovation, and privacy mechanisms.

Information Science Colloquium talks are free and open to the public.