RECENT NEWS

2026

• 🏅Our team MiyakoHAR (Arthur, Ken, Pana) won an Excellence Award at CUHK-X Multimodal Human Activity Challenge (Small Model Track). [16 Sep 2026]

• We provided a Capstone-Mini to Ikuei-Nishi Junior High School. [11 Sep 2026]

• Welcoming 1 PhD student and 4 master students as new lab members. [10 Sep 2026]

• Our following paper was published in JMIR Research Protocol, indexed by PubMed, SCI, and Scopus. Zilu Liang, Carl Daniel Karlsson. Investigating the Effects of Paralinguistic Configuration in Background Human Speech on Attention: Protocol for a Within-Subject Study. [31 Aug 2026]

• Our following papers have been accepted at the 2026 IEEE 15th Global Conference on Consumer Electronics (GCCE 2026), an annual flagship conference of the IEEE Consumer Technology Society. [10 Aug 2026]

  • Hoang NH, Karunarathna T, Villeneuve J, Melcer EF, Liang Z. Glanceable Chronotype and Social Jetlag on Smartwatches: A Gamified MCTQ Design.  (International collaboration with Carleton University, Canada) 

  • Senanayake AL, Yapa HPP, Liang Z. Reason First or Predict First: Enhancing the Interpretability of Large Language Models for Digital Mental Health Screening.  (International collaboration with University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg) 

  • Tungkunavipas A, Liang Z. Cross-Wavelength PPG Heart Rate Estimation Under Varying Skin Tones: A Comparative Study.

  • Raj P, Liang Z. User-in-the-Loop Cross-Model Evaluation of LLM-Generated Health Feedback.

  • Koo JA, Toendan KA, Shimada ET, Zaman A, Liang Z. Towards Safer Bathing: A Wearable Assistive System for Monitoring and Preventing Bathing-Related Health Risks in Older Adults.

  • Yusuf B, Liang Z. Cross-Model SHAP Interpretability Analysis for HRV-Based Stress Detection: Feature Importance, Direction, and Scale.

  • Intakornudom T,  Sahassapaht P, Tinnongjik K, Tantiwattanasirikul T, Ophasnavin S, Treekunprapha P, Liang Z. A Usability Study of an AI-Assisted XR-Based CPR Training System Using Consumer Smart Glasses.

  • Wiratma IN, Turnip AMA, Tjandra KN, Santoso JR, Piumarta I, Liang Z. KAKI: A Modular Smart Insole Platform for Lower-Body Sensing and Health Monitoring.

  • Kumar A, Meyer J, Liang Z. Postprandial Glucose Response Prediction Using Multimodal Consumer Health Data. 

• Our following papers have been accepted at the UbiComp / ISWC 2026, the top venue of ubiquitous computing research. [28 July 2026]

  • Wearable Design in Games and Entertainment (WDGE 2026) Workshop

    • Melcer EF, Villeneuve J, Tu A, Karunarathna T, Hoang NH, Liang Z. From Notifications to Quests: Reframing Wearable Health Interventions Through RPG Quest Systems.  (International collaboration with Carleton University, Canada) 

    • Karunarathna T, Hoang NH, Villeneuve J, Melcer EF, Liang Z. Lumitree: Repurposing Smartwatch Ambient Light Sensors for Morning Light Promotion through Serious Games. (International collaboration with Carleton University, Canada) 

  • Computing for Well-being (WellComp 2026) Workshop

    • Liang Z, Koo AJ, Toendan AK, Shimada ET, Zaman A, Hossain FMM, Tan DGJ, Mohamed IA, Ayun QQ, S Matsunaga, Junaideen AS. The Missing Positive Class: A Position on Ethically-Constrained Ground Truth in Wearable Health Sensing.

    • Karunarathna T, Hoang NH, Villeneuve J, Melcer EF, Liang Z. Indoor-Outdoor Classification Using Consumer Smartwatch Ambient Light Sensors in Everyday Environments. (International collaboration with Carleton University, Canada) 

  • Explainable AI for Ubiquitous, Pervasive and Wearable Computing (XAI4U 2026) Workshop

    • Yapa HPP, Senanayake AL, Liang Z. Beyond Plausibility and Informativeness: Evaluating Utility and Faithfulness of LLM Explanations in Digital Mental Health. (International collaboration with University of Luxemburg, Luxemburg) 

  • 🏅 Student Challenge

    • Intakornudom T,  Sahassapaht P, Tinnongjik K, Ophasnavin S, Tantiwattanasirikul T, Liang Z. From Real-Time Feedback to Adaptive Coaching: An AI Agent for Wearable CPR Training.

    • Shimada ET, AKAIDUZZAMAN AKM, Koo JA, Toendan KA, Rostum K, Liang Z. Aegis: An On-Device Foundation Model Agent for Safety-Critical Triage Under Potentially Conflicting Sensor Evidence in Elderly Bathing.

• We provided Capstone-Mini program to visitors in 4 Open Campus event. [July-Aug 2026] 

• JSPS staff visited our lab and interviewed our JSPS Postdoc fellow Abbey Liu. [24 July 2026]

• We provided open lab for visitors from Hikone Technical High School. [23 July 2026] 

• Our following submissions have been accepted at the 8th World Symposium on Software Engineering. [22 July 2026] 

  • Raj P, Liang Z. A Modular Architecture and Dual-Level Evaluation Framework for Semantically Grounded LLM Feedback in Mobile Health.

  • Bhardwaj S, Liang Z. Developing a Gamified Goal Management and Habit Tracking System Utilizing a Cross-Platform Behavioural Analytics framework.

• Our following full paper were presented at the 17th ACM Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics (ACM BCB). Ashala Lakmini Senanayake, Zilu Liang. CIERTe: Continuous Inter-Event Relative Temporal Anchoring for Anxiety Detection from Social Media Posts. (Regular paper acceptance rate = 20%)  [30 June 2026]

• Welcome JSPS Research Fellow Abbey Liu from University of Delaware. [20 June 2026]

• We hosted two open lab events for visitors from our industrial collaborators.​​ [May-June 2026] 

• Dr. Liang gave an invited talk at the 9th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Big Data (ICAIBD 2026). [30 May 2026]

• Our following paper was accepted by Frontiers in Digital Health (Q1), indexed by SCI and Scopus. Liang Z. Within-Person Modeling of Postprandial Glucose Using Multimodal Wearable Data. [28 May 2026]

• Dr. Liang gave a Keynote talk at the Workshop on Behavioral and Emotion Analysis through wearable Technology (BEAT) entitled Frictionless by Design, Bounded by Ethics: Rethinking Data Collection with Wearable Sensing. [25 May 2026]

• 🏅Dr. Liang received a Best Presentation Award at the 10th International Conference on Medical and Health Informatics (ICMHI 2026) for presenting Visual Analytics of Sugar Intake and Postprandial Interstitial Glucose Dynamics Using 3D Surface Plots. [20 May 2026]

• Welcome 2 research interns from Ohio State University. They will be working on continuous glucose prediction with wearable devices. [16 May 2026]

• We were honored to welcome Prof. Seiji Nishino (Director, Sleep and Circadian Neurobiology Laboratory, Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine), Dr. Naoya J Maeda-Nishino (Stanford Center for Sleep Sciences and Medicine), and Mrs. Chie Nishino (Director, NOB Shiftwork Research), and engage in inspiring discussions on sleep science and technologies. [1 May 2026]

• 🏅Our ThermalGuardian Team (Arthur, Ken, Ethan, and Zaman) won the 2nd Place @ iCAN’26 Contest🎉 This outstanding achievement reflects the team’s dedication, creativity, and strong technical capabilities in developing innovative MEMS-based solutions for health and wellbeing. Following this success, the team has been selected to represent Japan in the international round of the competition. We are excited to see them take their work to the global stage and continue to demonstrate excellence in innovation and research. Congratulations to the entire team, and we wish them the very best in the upcoming international competition! [26 April 2026]

• Our following paper was accepted by IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics (Q1, top 5%, acceptance rate = 14.4%), indexed by SCI and Scopus.  Priyadarshana YHPP, Zhou N, Krishnaswamy P, Jiang R, Liang Z. MediPhen: Prompt-Based LLM Reasoning with Synthesized Multimodal Clinical Knowledge for Zero-Shot Multi-morbidity Phenotyping. (International collaboration with A*STAR, Singapore) [24 April 2026]

• Our following paper was accepted by MethodsX (Q1), indexed by SCI and Scopus.  Liang Z, Khotchasing  K, Hoang N. Catching a Yawn: A Multimodal Experimental Protocol for Investigating Sleepiness under Visual and Auditory Yawning Stimuli featuring Human and Digital Characters. [19 April 2026]

• 🏆Our joint research proposal with the Faculty of Medicine at Université Paris Cité, "Public Health Meets AI-Powered Persuasive Technologies: Addressing Emerging Health Risks in Young People through Responsible Digital Innovation", has been selected for the "Exploration France" Programme, an initiative of the Embassy of France in Japan aimed at promoting France–Japan research collaboration and academic exchange. (International collaboration with Université Paris Cité, France) [10 April 2026]

• 🏅Congratulations to our 2025 summer research intern Hayden Morrison on receiving the 2026 OSU Student Impact Award! Well done, Hayden— we’re proud of you! [03 April 2026]

• 🎖️Dr. Liang was honored to receive an IEEE Japan Council Medal in recognition of over a decade of significant contributions to research and education in ubiquitous computing, personal informatics, and digital health. [23 March 2016]

• 🏅Our Special Issue "Wearable Sensors for Continuous Health Monitoring and Analysis" received an Outstanding Special Issue Award. It has been an honor and a valuable learning experience working with Prof. Juan Antonio Holgado-Terriza and Dr. Pablo Pico-Valencia (University of Granada, Spain). Looking forward to continuing to contribute to the open science community and advancing research in wearable health technologies. The second edition of our special issue is now open for submissions. [18 March 2026]

• We were honored to welcome Prof. Evangelos Karapanos (Cyprus University of Technology) and engage in inspiring discussions on interaction design and persuasive technologies. [17 March 2026]

• We presented the following papers at the 19th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2026). [3 March 2026]

  • Hoang NH, Liang Z. Decision Threshold Optimization in Machine Learning Models for Questionnaire-Based OSA Screening. (Full paper acceptance rate = 25%) 

  • Liang Z, Hoang NH, Melcer E, and Hwang D. Unlocking Collaborative Creativity: Co-Design Smartwatch-Based Serious Games for Sleep Hygiene Intervention.  (Full paper acceptance rate = 25%, International collaboration with Carleton University, Canada)  

  • Priyadarshana YHPP, Senanayake AL, Liang Z. How Interpretable Are LLMs? A Multi-Metric Framework for Evaluating Synthetic Explanations in Digital Mental Health. (Full paper acceptance rate = 25%) 

  • Karunarathna TS, Hoang NH, Liang Z. GlucoPatrol: A Multi-Stakeholder Dashboard for Contextual Exploration of Continuous Glucose Monitoring Data.

  • Liang Z, Hoang NH, Karunarathna TS. Biochemical Self-Tracking as Personal Informatics: Sensemaking and Actionability of At-Home Micronutrient Tests.

  • Koo J, Toendan KA, Shimada ET, Akaiduzzaman AKM, Liang Z.  Thermal Guardian: An Assistive Wearable System for Home-Based Monitoring and Prevention of Bathing Related Health Risks in Older Adults.

• Our following submissions were published in Sleep Medicine, a top journal in sleep research. [5 Feb 2026]

  • Liang Z, Chapa-Martell MA. (2026) Visualizing Temporal Patterns in Sleep Tracker Accuracy: A Novel Approach to Validating Consumer Sleep Technologies. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108640.

  • Liang Z. (2026) Improving Sleep Stage Classification from Consumer Wearables Using a Two-Level Machine Learning Framework with Selective Correction. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108599.

  • Liang Z. (2026) Unpacking the Discrepancy Between Subjective and Wearable-Measured Sleep: A Neurophysiological Perspective Using fNIRS. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108540.

  • Liang Z. (2026) Bedtime Stress and Prefrontal Cortex Hemodynamics During Sleep: A Pilot Study Using Wearable fNIRS and Salivary Biomarkers. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108304.

  • Liang Z,  Hoang N, Karunarathna T. (2026) Uncovering Sleep-Linked Glucose Dynamics in Healthy Individuals Using Wearable Data. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108538.

  • Hoang N, Liang Z. (2026) Interpretable Machine Learning Using Questionnaire Data: A Scalable Approach for Sleep Apnea Screening. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108099.

  • Hoang  N, Villeneuve J, Morrison H, Tu A, Karunarathna T, Hwang D, Chen S, Khotchasing K, Liang Z, Melcer E. (2026) Delivering Sleep Hygiene Interventions through Smartwatch-based Serious Sleep Games. Sleep Medicine 138(Supp.): 108585. (International collaboration with Carleton University, Canada, and University of California Santa Cruz, USA)