Abstract:

What if a building could understand human health? For centuries, the built environments around us have been regarded as passive and imperceptive, mainly to provide a safe space for life. My research develops ambient sensing and AI to transform the passive built environment into active intelligent agents for long-term, personalized health management. Especially, we leverage human-induced ambient signals in the environment, such as structural vibrations, utility consumption, object movements, and environmental changes, to collectively infer health information about people. For example, when people walk, floor vibrations generated by footsteps allow gait monitoring (i.e., assessing balance and fall risks), enabling early detection and rehabilitation of movement-related disorders such as Parkinson's and Stroke. Ultimately, we aim to redefine the relationship between humans and the built environment, offering a non-intrusive, human-centered solution for long-term health management at home tailored to individuals' needs.

Speaker's Bio:

Dr. Yiwen Dong is an Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, directing the Ubiquitous Health Intelligence (UbiHealth) Lab at the Department of Industrial and Enterprise Systems Engineering. Her research aims to empower physical environments to sense, infer, and react to human health through ambient sensing and AI systems. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and integrates ubiquitous computing, smart built environment, and human-centered AI. Her research not only extracts digital biomarkers through ambient sensing for gait & mobility, cardiovascular functions, and cognition, but also aims to discover new features and relationships between clinical health outcomes and individuals' daily behaviors. This innovative approach has made a real-world impact by providing rapid gait screening in multiple hospital corridors for individuals with Muscular Dystrophy, Cerebral Palsy, and Multiple Sclerosis. In addition, Dr. Dong's research has led to a broader impact through multimodal ambient intelligence in animal farms. Her work has garnered recognition through publications in top-tier conferences and journals, earning her multiple best paper and presentation awards. Dr. Dong received her Ph.D. and M.S. from Stanford University and B.Eng. from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.