Amanda Watson
University of Virginia
Title: Wearable Technology for Healthcare and Athletic Performance
Abstract: In the future, wearable technology will provide a continuous, autonomous, and comprehensive assessment of a person’s health. This future presents a tremendous opportunity for the development of new wearable devices that will support predictive analytics and personalized medicine. On the hardware side, we are liberating sensors from the bench top in the clinical lab and introducing them into the wild. Most commonly, smartwatches provide sensors that enable vital sign monitoring, such as heart rate and pulse oximetry. However, many of the most powerful sensing techniques are still limited to the benchtop. In this talk, I will introduce my recent work on developing a wearable optical spectroscopy device for non-invasive health monitoring. I will discuss the challenges of redesigning traditional spectroscopic methods to overcome the resource constraints of a wearable device and facilitate the adaptation to dynamically changing environments. Further, I will explore how this device can be used to continuously monitor biomarkers such as glucose or opioids. Finally, I will discuss my vision for the future; enabling a future where everyone has a comprehensive understanding of their own health at their fingertips.
Biography: Amanda Watson is an Assistant Professor in Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Virginia. She is also affiliated with the LINK lab, a multi-disciplinary center for research and education in Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS). Her research interests include Wearable Technology, Medical Cyber-Physical Systems, Internet of Medical Things, Ubiquitous and Mobile Computing, and Smart Health. Before joining UVA, she was a postdoctoral scholar at the PRECISE Center at the University of Pennsylvania where she was mentored by James Weimer and Insup Lee. Previously, she was a member of the LENS lab where she researched wearable technology with Gang Zhou.
Host: Dr. Cong Shen
Organizer: Dr. Cong Shen and Dr. Mona Zebarjadi