Research on AI for health has immense potential to transform healthcare. We are developing AI technologies that can improve disease diagnosis, detect early signs of illness, help understand the relationships among biology, behavior, and health, and recommend personalized treatment plans. These advancements would enhance accuracy, explainability, and safety of healthcare, and enable the discovery of new diagnostic and treatment methods. Moreover, AI could optimize administrative tasks, streamline hospital workflows, and enhance patient care by minimizing errors and improving efficiency. Consequently, integrating AI into healthcare systems can save lives, reduce expenses, and elevate the overall quality of healthcare, profoundly benefitting society.

Wearable technologies provide vital healthcare solutions for patients who rely on assistive care, including elderly individuals, people with disabilities, patients undergoing rehabilitation, those requiring close medical monitoring, and individuals managing mental health conditions. Wearable devices offer significant promise in advancing assistive technologies: wearable sensors offer real-time feedback regarding medically relevant biomarkers and signals, aiding in the early detection, prevention, and monitoring of diseases, while wearable actuators move the body or transmit haptic signals. Meanwhile, many passive and powered wearable devices, including orthoses, exosuits, and prostheses, combine sensing and actuation to provide responsive interactions that target a range of activities such as walking, bathing, eating, and dressing by augmenting, supplementing, or retraining capabilities including vision, hearing, mobility, and cognition.

Imaging for health is indispensable to providing precise, efficient, and compassionate patient care, ultimately enhancing overall health outcomes and quality of life. From classical imaging modalities such as optical and medical imaging to emerging ones like photoacoustics, we are developing next-generation devices and machine learning algorithms to push the boundaries of accuracy, form factor, and efficiency of medical imaging technologies. These new technologies empower physicians to better understand the human body, measure and treat diseases, and provide therapy monitoring enabling timely and personalized treatment plans.

Understanding how bias affects all aspects of healthcare—from sensors to algorithms to the overall healthcare ecosystem—and how such systems can be better engineered to mitigate bias and improve healthcare access, is critical for improving health and wellbeing for all. We are engineering personalized healthcare solutions that are robust, affordable, and take into account the diversity of each individual’s lived experience. We are designing novel algorithms, data collection methods, and hardware that are optimized to the unique needs and backgrounds of each patient. Health equity is a mindset that we apply to all aspects of our work to promote equitable access to effective and quality healthcare.

Robotic technologies have transformed how healthcare is provided. We are developing new methods for robotic-assisted surgeries that offer greater precision and shorter recovery times to robots aiding in repetitive tasks like medication delivery, rehabilitation, and patient monitoring, these advancements have demonstrated their potential to significantly improve healthcare outcomes. We are developing robotic systems to address healthcare systems challenges, such as the aging population and the shortage of healthcare professionals, by enhancing training efficacy, filling critical gaps, improving accessibility, and increasing the overall efficiency and personalization of healthcare delivery. 

Advanced biosensors and their integration into point-of-care handheld, wearable, and implantable digital devices are revolutionizing health and fitness, by offering real-time monitoring and data-driven insights into an individual's physiological and biochemical state. We are developing technologies that offer unprecedented health insights with comfortable, unobtrusive, and accessible devices. We are thus investigating fundamental technologies including flexible and long-term bio/chemical/electrical sensors, and miniaturized, low-power (and self-powered) electronics for collecting, processing, and transmitting sensor data. We are further integrating these novel technologies into practical systems to conduct clinically relevant evaluations and translational studies. 

Wearable and ingestible bioelectronic systems are revolutionizing how digital technologies interact with our bodies. By combining advanced materials, mechanics, and wireless capabilities, these systems can now achieve far better integration with the human body, enabling digital-based health monitoring and therapeutic strategies that were previously impossible. For instance, we are developing systems capable of undergoing significant mechanical deformations to seamlessly accommodate the human body, creating transient electronic systems that can be reabsorbed over clinically relevant timeframes, and utilizing advanced computational models to optimize the design and fabrication of bioelectronics. Ultimately, we aim to develop wearable, implantable, and ingestible electronics that can address unmet clinical needs.