mhealth Research Group:mhealth Research Group: People

People

Principal Investigators

Prof. Stephen Intille

Dr. Intille is an Associate Professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. His research focuses on the development of novel healthcare technologies that incorporate ideas from ubiquitous computing, user-interface design, pattern recognition, behavioral science, and preventive medicine. After ten years as Technology Director of the House_n Research Consortium at MIT, in 2010 he joined Northeastern University to help establish a new transdiciplinary Ph.D. program in Personal Health Informatics and the mHealth research group. Read more…

Prof. Dinesh John

Professor Dinesh John is a faculty member at Northeastern in the Department of Health Sciences and a close collaborator with the mHealth Group. He is a trained exercise physiologist and an expert on the application of wearable sensors to measure and modify physical behavior. A degree in exercise physiology combined with an in-depth understanding of sensor function, sensor signal response to human movement and physiology, and signal processing, places him uniquely at the intersection of technology and lifestyle disease prevention. This has enabled him to pursue novel applications of technology in health through collaborative work with scientists from diverse fields such as engineering computer science, behavior change psychology, and public health. He is actively interested in recruiting PhD students who want to work in this space.

Co-Investigators

Prof. Justin Manjourides

Dr. Suzi Bertisch (Brigham and Women's Hospital)

Doctoral Student Contributors

Hoan Duc Tran – Personal Health Informatics doctoral student

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Binod Thapa Chhetry – Personal Health Informatics doctoral student

Binod earned his M.S in Biomedical Engineering from the University of Texas at Arlington. After that he worked as a programmer analyst at Columbia University Medical Center before joining Northeastern. Binod is equally excited about recent advances in computing and mobile technology and behavioral and social psychology. By consolidating them, he aims to build interactive mobile health systems capable of just-in-time, tailored interventions to promote healthy behavior. He is currently focused on machine learning algorithms that learn behavior patterns and routines from a user’s sensor data.

Rithika Lakshminarayanan – Personal Health Informatics doctoral student

Rithika earned her B.Tech in computer science from Shiv Nadar University, India in 2019. She wants to combine her experience in computer engineering with behavioral economics to help people make healthier lifestyle choices. She is currently working on a new way of texting that allows the delivery of messages at the ‘right moment’ to provide support even when one is busy. She is broadly interested in developing computer-mediated applications to facilitate better communication in underrepresented populations.

Jixin Li – Personal Health Informatics doctoral student

Jixin received his M.A. in Statistics from Columbia University, and B.A. in Psychology from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Prior to joining mHealth research group at the Northeastern University, he worked one year as a data analyst for an educational technology startup in Boston. His research interests are in the use of mobile and sensor technology to delineate human behavior and mental states. He is currently working on data analysis of uEMA and building on statistical software to analyze experience sampling data. He aims to integrate EMA in developing just-in-time, tailored mobile interventions to promote human health.

John (Jack) Hester – Personal Health Informatics doctoral student

Jack Hester is a Reno native, and throughout his life he has had countless personal encounters with the health care system. He graduated from Emory University in 2019 with a Bachelor of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies in Societies and Cultures with an emphasis in upstream healthcare and behavioral modeling, and went on to receive Master of Public Health in Health Services at Brown University where he graduated in 2021. He also has significant experience with the development of technology and software ranging from website development to NLP tools. He hopes to continue to combine his experiences with public health and technology to facilitate long-term behavior change and to create wearables as well as patient-facing tools and dashboards that will improve health.

Co-op Research Assistants

Tess Willenger – BS in Health Sciences student

Tess is a 4th year undergraduate Health Science student who is passionate about working as a co-op with the mHealth Group to further explore the intersection of research and public health. She has previous work experience working clinically at the Emergency Department at Brigham and Women’s Hospital as well as Fenway Community Health Center.

Yash

Prathamesh completed his undergraduate degree in engineering in information technology from the University of Mumbai. He has been working in Android Development since 2015 and is an active contributor to the open-source community. He has built a custom version of Android called "FireHound." Many OEM developers developed builds of FireHound for their devices and posted them on respective forums. In 2017, he found a UI bug in Stock Android OS now patched in every Android Device manufactured after 2017. He's worked on apps for the police and on an Android security infrastructure for preventing reverse engineering of proprietary applications. He is working on app development for research projects with the mHealth Research Group.

Vivek Sharma – M.S in Information Systems student

Vivek completed his undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from GBPUAT, Pantnagar, India. He has experience working as a software developer at Tata Consultancy Services, India for more than two years. He has been working on IoT modules since his bachelors degree, and started working on Android and IoT integration in 2019. He is working on developing some IoT room sensors using Arduino for research projects with the mHealth Research Group.

Data Annotators

An undergraduate? Interested in research? We are always looking for highly-motivated students who want to get research experience! If this is you, see the Get Involved page.

Kyleigh Watson – BS in Health Sciences student

Kyleigh is a 4th year Honors Health Science student from Long Island, New York interested in pursuing a career in public health. She is currently working on my Honors Capstone project with the mHealth Research Group. This project is conducting research on the use of personal data tracking tools for health research.

Aryton Hoi – BS in Computer Science student

Aryton is interested in the application of computer science within the field of human health. He has previously completed a co-op at MIT Lincoln Labs with Group 48 working on an automated 3D axon tracing UNet neural network, and has also won an award at HackMIT2019 with a submission aimed at combatting media echo chambers.

Dhivas Sugumar – BS in Computer Science student

Dhivas is interested in the use of wearable technology to detect illnesses in people at early stage and how doing so might help them receive treatment in time. He is working on new ways of visualizing intensive longitudinal data acquired from smartwatches and smartphones.

Shashank Jarmale – BS in Computer Science and Business Administration student

Shashank is interested in applications of computer and data science to the physical sciences, especially medicine, energy, and the environment. He previously worked on a project revolving around machine learning-based detection of heart arrhythmias like atrial fibrillation using ECG data from wearable sensors. His hope is to work on applications of ML in domains that help build a healthier and more sustainable world.

Affiliates

Dr. Aditya Ponnada (recent mHealth group graduate)

Aditya earned is Bachelors in Design (B.Des) from Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati, India and worked for two years as a UX Researcher at Samsung Electronics, India. He is broadly interested in human-computer interaction, mobile/ubiquitous computing, and behavioral assessments. He aims to use mobile and wearable devices to measure behaviors that sensors cannot directly measure, using techniques such as ecological momentary assessment. He believes that, in a few years, individuals will be able to take better control of their health with the power of mobile technologies. He now works at Spotify Research.

Dr. Qu Tang (recent mHealth group graduate)

Qu earned his doctorate in Electrical and Computer Engineering at Northeastern University (Boston, MA, USA) while working with the mHealth group. His primary research interest is in mobile/pervasive computing, physical activity recognition and mobile sensing system design, especially in real-time sensor monitoring and activity recognition, human-in-loop/active learning and health data mining. Qu Tang received his M.S. degree in Electrical Engineering at Northeastern and his B.E. degree in Opto-Electronics at the University of Electronic Science and Technology of China (UESTC) in 2010.

Key Internal Collaborators

Prof. Varun Mishra
Prof. Seth Cooper and the Playable Innovative Technologies Lab