Developing Health-Aware Built Environments for Personalized and Preventive Care
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. With new advancements in device-free sensing and artificial intelligence, our research is transforming the passive built environment into active intelligent agents for personalized and preventive healthcare. Especially, we leverage human-induced building responses, such as structural vibrations, visual changes, and environmental disturbances, to infer critical health information of the people. For example, when people walk inside buildings, structural vibrations generated by people’s footsteps allow gait health monitoring (i.e., assessing how a person walks), enabling mobility assessments, early detection, and progressive tracking of neuromusculoskeletal diseases such as Alzehiemer’s, Parkinson’s, and Stroke. While existing approaches require frequent in-person visits to clinics that pose barriers to accessing medical services, our research is transforming our everyday physical environment into active partners that sense, understand, and respond to individuals’ health. Our prior research has achieved gait health monitoring that extracted a person’s identity, balance, and joint motions through structural vibration sensing and physics-informed machine learning. Our recent studies are expanding towards long-term, multimodal health monitoring and intervention by integrating vibration, visual, and environmental changes for personalized and preventive healthcare at home. This research redefines the relationship between humans and the built environment, offering a non-intrusive, contactless, privacy-friendly solution for chronic disease management and remote patient monitoring in the long term.
Biography: 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 our physical spaces to sense, infer, and react to human health and well-being through the development of cyber-physical-human systems. Her work is highly interdisciplinary and integrates ubiquitous computing, civil engineering, and human-centered AI. Her research is pioneering the development of human gait health monitoring through footstep-induced floor 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, Dr. Dong’s research has led to a broader impact through multimodal sensing with cameras and vibration sensors in pig pens. Her work has garnered recognition through publications in top-tier conferences and journals across civil engineering, computer science, and biomedical engineering, 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.