Computer science students win Best Paper Award at IEEE health informatics conference

By Nicole Capozziello

The winning paper presents an innovative way of collecting wearable data. This innovation has the potential for many applications in healthcare, such as detecting falls for older adults, physical rehabilitation and heart disease prevention.

“Winning the best paper award from ICHI, a top conference in the smart health arena, is a great testament of the quality of the research of our faculty and graduate students. Hopefully it will inspire more students to follow suit in the near future,” says Jinhui Xu, professor and chair of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Titled “The Visual Accelerometer: A High-Fidelity Optic-to-Inertial Transformation Framework for Wearable Health Computing," the paper’s other authors are recently graduated students Zhengxiong Li, now an assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver, Xingyu Chen, a PhD student at the University of California - San Diego, Aditya Rathore, a data scientist at Micron Technology Inc., and Hanbing Zhang, a postdoctoral fellow at Yale University. 

“Wearable computing is becoming a popular, privacy-preserving way of monitoring human daily life activities, which are a set of key indicators of human health status that can be used for disease prediction and mental health monitoring. Currently, wearable computing relies heavily on AI systems requiring a lot of well-annotated data for learning, which is costly to acquire,” says Chenhan Xu. 

“We proposed a new paradigm that uses the advantages of both solutions, i.e., harvesting data and models from a data-rich camera-based scheme, to generate the training data for an always-on wearable computing scheme,” says Huining Li. “To be more specific, we extract inertial motion information from publicly available video data, such as from YouTube and Facebook, and use them to develop wearable computing models.”

This research could lower the bar for developing wearable computing algorithms and/or systems and conducting related research, thereby benefiting startups and researchers in this field. The group plans to follow up this work with medical researchers at the University at Buffalo.

The work was done under the direction of Wenyao Xu, an associate professor of computer science and engineering and the director of the Embedded Sensing and Computing (ESC) group. The lab focuses on mobile and internet of things technology, particularly as applied in smart health. 

Chenhan Xu presented at the conference, which brings together world-class researchers to discuss the challenges/solutions for connected health. 

“It is interesting having conversations with doctors and researchers and I am very glad they recognize our research work,” he says. “Attending the conference also helped me understand how our research could contribute to health informatics.”

ICHI is a premier conference in the field of smart health and is concerned with the application of computer science, information science, data science, and informatics principles, as well as information technology, and communication science and technology, to address problems and support research in healthcare, medicine, life science, public health, and everyday wellness. This year’s conference, the 10th annual, was held in Rochester, Minn. from June 11-14, 2022.