Research Vision
The well-being of human sets the foundation of the development of the society. However, modern medical curations still have barriers such as expensive medical devices and limited medical resources that prevent the public from convenient and cost-effective service. Especially in the current period when the coronavirus pandemic sweeps across the world, people find themselves disproportionately vulnerable to the virus’s impact, making traditional healthcare services less accessible due to heightened risk.
As we spend a substantial portion of spare time at home, a smart home that can care about our health status and understand our demands is essential to our happiness and well-being. The development of sensing technology, especially wearables and contactless sensing technology, brings a revolution over the traditional medical solutions. Smart homecare technology provides us with an affordable alternative to other healthcare services. More convenient and cost-effective solutions make more people accessible to the medical resources, even enjoy professional medical care at home and benefit the public health to a great degree.
Our expectation is to achieve intelligent healthcare and smart home through the use of increasingly convenient and cost-effective sensing technology. Meanwhile, we aim to expand the boundaries of sensing by enhancing our understanding of its capabilities and implementing intelligent learning algorithms.
Ubiqutious and Low-Cost Spectroscopy
Dietary information is a critical dimension for health management. This information can be used to improve our health with self-awareness. If we can monitor food intake over the long term, it could enable doctors and nutritionists to study how chronic diseases are related to dietary habits and provide food suggestions for the population. Furthermore, some special populations have special needs for food intake and we need to pay extra attention to them. In this part, we mainly care about general food nutrition and type detection for normal people, and give special attention to the infants to monitor baby food nutrients.
- General Food Nutrition and Calorie Detection:
Dietary information is a critical dimension for health management but has no convenient solution yet. We ask whether we can track meal composition unobtrusively. In this research, we introduce NIRSCAM, a new design that can recognize food calories and nutrients during the intake process, without on-body instruments.
- Nutrient monitoring of baby food:
Proper nutrient intake is essential for infants. Currently, mothers can only track their baby’s nutrient intake from food packages (for commercial food) or recipes (for homemade food), which could be cumbersome and unreliable. Therefore, we build a low-cost spectrometer system for accurate baby food nutrient monitoring, named BabyNutri, which costs less than 10 dollars but achieves comparable performance to commercial solutions.
However, there are several challenges facing more cost-effective and convenient ways for intake monitoring. On the one hand, cost-effective devices always take the weak capability and are easy to interfere with. Thus, the first key point is to deal with the ubiquitous interference and improve the signal quality of the system by both hardware and software design. On the other hand, only limited and coarse-grained information can be obtained from the cost-effective device. We need to deal with the primitive signal and utilize methods to extract effective information so as to deduce the food intake.
Future Direction
My long-term research goal is to leverage optical sensing technology to achieve cost-effective and reliable detection of people’s health. In particular, spectroscopy has great potential in detecting food composition, safety, and quality. However, current spectroscopy devices tend to be bulky and expensive. Fortunately, the development of new nanooptical materials and deep learning models has made it possible to create cost-effective and miniaturized spectrometers. Our aim is to harness these emerging technologies and explore the full capabilities of spectroscopy within the context of an ubiquitous computing society.