Personal Health Informatics at Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Defining the future by building technology tools to help people and communities stay healthy across the lifespan
Computer technology has vast potential to help people understand their health and to make and sustain changes that improve their well-being throughout their life. With the nation’s only PhD program in Personal Health Informatics (a joint program with Northeastern’s Bouvé College of Health Sciences), Khoury College faculty and graduate students are conducting breakthrough research in areas ranging from mobile health application design, the use of virtual agents to provide behavioral health coaching, and enhancing fitness tracking effectiveness by incorporating storytelling. With an interdisciplinary approach and applied research projects in communities nationwide, Khoury College is inventing the future of how we all stay healthy.
Making a difference in everyday life
Personal Health Informatics and Data Visualization investigators at Khoury College are working to build interactive tools to help people with Type 1 diabetes (an estimated 1.5 million Americans) and their providers understand daily patterns that could help them fine-tune and customize their insulin use and other aspects of disease management.
Among their many research endeavors, Khoury researchers are studying how virtual agents, such as computerized health and fitness coaches, can help people comply with medications, fitness plans, and diet, as well as monitor their physical and mental health: tapping technology to learn what works for them and to build habits they can sustain.
Sample research areas
- Mobile and wearable health devices and systems (mHealth)
- Health counseling dialogue systems
- Assistive health technologies, with special emphasis on underserved populations
- Visualization tools for adjusting diabetes treatment protocols
- New scientific tools for measuring health-related behavior during everyday life
- Robotic health assistants
- Human-centered computing to support aging in place
Khoury researchers: At the forefront
Current project highlights
Sleep disturbances, including undiagnosed sleep apnea, are increasingly common in midlife adults due to hormonal changes, weight fluctuations, and shifts in neuromotor control. This project uses ambient acoustic monitoring to analyze sleep breathing patterns captured through everyday devices. By applying AI-driven signal processing to overnight recordings, we aim to detect early signs of sleep-disordered breathing and link them to cognitive and hormonal changes. The goal is to develop non-invasive, home-based tools that support earlier diagnosis and personalized treatment planning for midlife sleep and neurological health.
Khoury and Bouvé researchers have developed methods to identify early signs of partner violence through detecting disagreements in SMS conversations between romantic partners, particularly focusing on high-risk juvenile justice-involved and child welfare youth. By combining text messaging metadata with advanced NLP techniques, such as text embeddings and sentiment analysis, this approach improves the detection of disagreements. The models, tested on data from at-risk populations, also included large language models (LLMs) to evaluate their adaptability in this task. These approaches hold potential for supporting real-time interventions to prevent conflicts from escalating into intimate partner violence (IPV). (PI: Aarti Sathyanarayana)
Khoury researchers are developing a smartphone-based system that administers patient-reported outcomes over time to cancer patients at home using a conversational agent on their smartphones, and the ability to display collected data to patients and clinicians using novel data visualizations. The system is being evaluated in clinical trials with two different populations of cancer patients and is supported by the National Cancer Institute, and in collaboration with Tufts Medical Center and the University of Chicago. (PI: Timothy Bickmore)
Preteen girls are experiencing unprecedented rates of depression and suicidal thoughts; understanding social dynamics that arise in preteen girls’ social media use, including the temporal unfolding of rejection, is critical to uncovering mechanisms of mental health susceptibility to social media experiences at this pivotal developmental stage. In this study, Khoury researchers are deploying uEMA, a novel smartwatch-based data collection system developed at Northeastern, to measure behavior and possibly inform the development of novel interventions and media guidelines aimed at reducing the negative impacts of social media engagement on mental health in preteen girls. (PI: Stephen Intille)
The lack of regular physical activity in over 290,000 individuals with spinal cord injury (SCI) in the US is an ongoing health crisis. This NIH-funded project is studying the integration of a just-in-time-adaptive intervention strategy developed on smartwatches at Northeastern with a web-based physical activity intervention program for individuals with SCI in the community. (PI: Stephen Intille)
Connect+
The Connect+ project explores how technology can be used to help students connect with others, combatting what has been called a global epidemic of loneliness.