*Presentation will be recorded.
Abstract:
What if a building could sense human health? Human gait health monitoring (i.e., assessing how a person walks) provides critical indicators of an individual’s physical and mental health status, enabling early detection and progressive tracking of neuromusculoskeletal diseases such as Cerebral Palsy and Parkinson’s. Existing systems require frequent in-person visits to gait clinics and produce sporadic results under unrealistic scenarios; they also pose significant barriers for disadvantaged populations to access medical services. To overcome these challenges, my research leverages floor vibrations generated by people’s footsteps to infer gait health when people walk inside buildings. My approach has successfully extracted gait health information, including the walker’s identity, balance, risks of gait abnormalities, and lower-limb joint motions, through the development of floor vibration sensing and physics-informed learning. This allows low-cost, non-intrusive, continuous human health monitoring in people’s daily living spaces.
Bio:
Yiwen Dong is an interdisciplinary researcher at Stanford University. Her research aims to empower civil structures with the ability to sense, model, and react to human health and well-being through the integration of structural dynamics, biomechanics, and human-centered AI. Her current research is pioneering the development of human gait health monitoring through footstep-induced structural vibrations. This innovative approach has made a real-world impact by providing accessible tracking of muscular dystrophy progression in children from disadvantaged populations. In addition, Yiwen’s research has led to a broader impact on improving animal welfare with the collaboration of the USDA through sensing and analyzing pig-induced floor vibration during the lactation period. Her work has garnered recognition through publications in top-tier conferences and journals across civil, electrical, biomedical, and agricultural engineering, earning her multiple best paper and presentation awards. Before starting a Ph.D., Yiwen received her M.S. in Structural Engineering at Stanford University and earned her B.Eng. in Civil Engineering at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.