Deborah Estrin is a professor of computer science at UCLA, director of the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing, and co-founder of openmhealth.org.

She says many of the most significant health challenges across the globe involve chronic illnesses. Participatory mHealth leverages the power and ubiquity of mobile technologies to assist individuals and their clinicians in monitoring and managing symptoms, side effects and treatment for chronic illnesses outside the clinical setting, and to address the lifestyle factors that can bring on or exacerbate these conditions. By empowering individuals to track and manage their key health-related behaviors and outcomes, this approach has the potential to greatly improve people’s health and quality of life, while simultaneously reducing societies’ overall healthcare costs.

Participatory mHealth incorporates a variety of techniques, including automated actigraphy and mobility traces, smart context based reminders, phone-mediated exercises, and prompted experience sampling inputs. mHealth can assist patients with adherence to their treatment regimen during the course of their everyday activities, while providing to clinicians and researchers information about daily patterns that can inform personalized diagnosis and treatment but were not previously attainable. The software and methodologies for Participatory mHealth are relevant to a wide variety of chronic disease interventions, from maternal health to mental health.

This talk will Estrin's experience to date with mHealth pilots and prototypes and will discuss areas in need of significant research and development: open modular tools for data analysis and visualization across diverse data types, engaging user experience design, and privacy mechanisms such as personal data vaults and selective sharing.

Estrin received her Ph.D. in computer science from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her bachelor's from the University of California-Berkeley.

The lecture is open to all. You are welcome to bring your lunch.