Can Earables Revolutionise Continuous Vital Sign Monitoring?

Speaker: Fahim Kawsar, Nokia Bell Labs. Cambridge

Abstract: Do you know that someone has a heart attack by the time you finish reading this abstract? Indeed, every 40 seconds, a heart attack occurs, and a heart attack fatality occurs about every minute. For long, medical science has established that frequent monitoring of heart rate and blood pressure is the key to mitigating significant risks for stroke, heart failure and coronary artery disease. Current gold-standard vital sign monitoring devices are invasive, cause discomfort and interfere with users' activities. We challenge this status quo and ask - can your next earable be the secret weapon to manage your cardiovascular health? We aren't talking PopSci here but the remarkable capabilities of a sensory earable ushering a new pathway to a healthy heart. However, ensuring the accuracy and robustness of in-ear vital sign measurements is the most complex challenge in this vision. This talk will reflect on the algorithms and their systematic characterisations to address this challenge in continuously measuring the five most critical vital signs in our ear - Heart Rate (and Heart Rate Variability), SPO2, Respiration Rate, Temperature and Blood Pressure.

Biography: Fahim Kawsar leads Pervasive Systems research at Nokia Bell Labs, Cambridge and holds a Mobile Systems Professorship in Computing Science at Glasgow. At his Cambridge lab, he studies forms and intelligence of multi-sensory devices to learn, infer and augment human behaviour in three application areas - Digital Health, Quantified Lifestyle and Smart Built Environment. At Glasgow, he is building up a new group to study system and algorithmic challenges for Mobile Systems. Fahim's research has led to developing multiple artefacts for Nokia (e.g., Consumer Wearables, Sensing-as-a-Service, and Camera Analytics). He has (co-)authored 170+ research papers (Six Best Paper Awards) and granted 40+ patents (Two Top Nokia Innovator Awards). Fahim is a frequent keynote speaker across academic and industrial forums, is an AEIC of IEEE Pervasive Computing, sits at the editorial board of ACM IMWUT, serves (d) as a committee member of leading mobile computing conferences, received multiple million-scale research funds, and has a career accumulation of over €5 Million.

Host: prof. Marc Langheinrich