Health Sensing and Interventions

Description

This course, Health sensing and interventions (HSI), aims to bridge the gap between the medical sciences and computing.  At a high level, this course explores how to sense the human body and the various conditions/contexts that affect our health.  More specifically, this course will investigate:

-       Different systems of human physiology (high level) 

-       Existing devices that can measure our health.

-       Devices that can provide feedback to users regarding their health 

-       How these medical devices and health technologies work

-       Which technology to choose for a given problem 

-       How can we design new devices ourselves?  

We will explore the different systems of the human body and discuss how to measure (or trigger in case of interventions) various aspects of them.  We will brainstorm possible solutions, discuss how to test them, and discuss the implications of different approaches.  Students will be able to, but not required to, build a physical device.  A health sensing kit will be available for students to use. Some solutions require hardware, while others can be based on software-as-a-medical-device (SaMD), including mobile applications, data analysis, and algorithmic solutions.  Students should leave this course with the skills and confidence to tackle problems in healthcare that previously seemed insurmountable.  

At the undergraduate level (CS 4711), you will learn technical skills through several labs and apply those skills in a semester-long project in a team of 4.  At the graduate level (CS 7711), you will take your understanding of health technology and physiological data processing further through in-depth analysis of the labs, generating lab reports intended to push you to not only implement the code for processing the data, but also to demonstrate an understanding of the data to make informed decisions on how process the data based on your understanding of the techniques and physiology.  You will leverage this knowledge while working on a semester-long research project in a group of 2.  

Course Learning Outcomes

Upon successful completion of the course, students will be able to:

• Build on the foundations of health technology to develop practical applications.

• Discern the capabilities of different components of health tech, which enables informed decisions on feasibility, usability, and potential technical challenges.

• Exploit the potential of technology to address real-world health and medical problems.

• Feel enabled to attack issues in healthcare that seemed unreachable or impossible before