akane sano, assistant Professor
Imagine 24/7 rich human physiological and behavioral data could identify your health and wellbeing such as your stress level and cognitive ability and provide personalized early warnings to help you more resilient to stress or be alert and focus on your work. We have developed tools and algorithms for measuring, predicting and supporting individual, organizational and community health and wellbeing. Our studies targeted patients with mental illness as well as people at high risk of mental health and wellbeing due to to adverse events such as job/academic related demands and extended/shift work schedules. This talk will highlight a series of studies and technologies we have developed to investigate how to leverage multi-modal human data to measure, understand and improve mental health and wellbeing, challenges and learned lessons.
About Akane:
Dr. Akane Sano is an Assistant Professor at Rice University, Department of Electrical Computer Engineering and Computer Science. Her research focuses on human sensing, data analysis and application development for health and wellbeing. She is a member of Scalable Health Labs. She has been working on developing technologies to measure, forecast, understand and improve health and wellbeing. Akane has worked on measuring and predicting stress, mental health, sleep and performance and designing systems to help people to reduce their stress and improve their mental health, sleep and performance for student and employee populations including SNAPSHOT study project, Eureka project (symptom prediction and digital phenotyping in schizopherenia using phone data) and IARPA mPerf project (Using mobile sensors to support productivity and employee well-being). Akane obtained her PhD at MIT Media Lab, and her MEng and BEng at Keio University, Japan. Before she joined Rice University, she was a Research Scientist in Affective Computing Group at MIT Media Lab, and a visiting scientist/lecturer at People-Aware Computing Lab, Cornell University. Prior to coming to U.S., she was a researcher/engineer at Sony Corporation on wearable computing, intelligent systems and human computer interaction.