Edward Wang awarded NIH grant for work on smartphone-based Alzheimer's screening

Edward Wang (left), Eric Granholm (right)

Edward Wang, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at UC San Diego who directs the Ubiquitous Data and Computing Lab, has received a grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to develop a smartphone app that can screen for early signs of cognitive decline indicative of Alzheimer’s Disease (AD).

Wang, who has a joint appointment in the Design Lab at UC San Diego, will be leading the project with co-investigator Eric Granholm, a professor of psychiatry at UC San Diego and director of the university's Center for Mental Health Technology (MHTech). The National Institute of Aging selected the team for an NIH R21, also known as the Exploratory/Development Grant, which provides support in the early and conceptual stages of a project’s development. As part of a national push towards combating the debilitating effects of AD, the National Institute of Aging looked towards funding novel ways to screen for AD through the use of digital technologies. 

In the team's proposal, titled, “Smartphone Pupillometer for At-Home Screening for Risk of Alzheimer’s Disease,” Wang and Granholm aim to leverage camera systems found in smartphones to capture pupillary responses to cognitive tests as an indicator of the integrity of a specific part of the brain, the locus coeruleus, that has been shown to be one of the first sites affected by AD-related processes. By taking advantage of the smartphone as the vehicle for conducting such a test, Wang and Granholm believe that this approach of using digital technologies to capture physiological signals has the potential of significantly driving down the cost of deploying these screening solutions widely to combat public health challenges like AD.

“By further enhancing the signals that are captured using just your phone with signal processing and machine learning, we are able to derive, what are known as, digital biomarkers,” Wang says.

This approach strongly aligns with the National Institute of Aging’s Notice of Special Interest, which states that “current biomarkers for early detection of prodromal AD [...] are costly and invasive”, and digital biomarkers “can be used to inform disease prediction and management at both the individual and populational level.”

AD is a progressive degenerative disorder of the brain and is the sixth leading cause of death in the United States, with the latest statistics showing that at least five million Americans over the age of 65 suffer from the disease. Not only is it the most common form of dementia of elderly adults, it is projected that cases of AD will double by 2025. By 2050, it is projected that a total annual cost for health care for people with AD will be more than $1 trillion. AD is clearly a public health crisis.

“Our solution is based on previous findings in our research with older adults with mild cognitive impairment, where we studied how differences in pupil dilation in response to memory tests are associated with very early signs of AD,” Granholm says. “It is based on these findings that we are developing this smartphone solution.” If successful, Granholm notes, it would be possible for older adults to perform this test even in the comfort of their own homes or by their primary care providers. This is compared with what is available today, which are far more invasive solutions like PET/MRI imaging and lumbar puncture for biomarkers in the spinal fluid.

As a faculty member in the Design Lab, Wang has a particular interest in developing technologies through a lens of human centered design. Wang has had a record of inventing new smartphone-based health monitoring solutions such as hemoglobin/anemia screening, blood pressure monitoring, and ocular disease. In developing these solutions, Wang has worked with a wide range of collaborators across the world to develop and test these systems with end users to make sure that the purported solutions truly can work with the target users and in realistic conditions. “Sometimes what we find is that an idea works well in lab settings where we can control the lighting and temperature of the room, but completely fails in realistic conditions that screening tools like these have to operate under,” Wang says.

Wang working in a village in the Amazon Jungle of Peru testing his smartphone hemoglobin monitor.

In a previous workaround anemia screening, Wang worked with NGOs in Peru to bring his prototype app into villages nestled in the Amazonian Jungle, where NGO staff regularly travel to in order to perform anemia screening and treatments.

"It turns out, we never considered that the main use case for our technology is really to screen for anemia in kids under 3 years old. Although the physics still holds, behaviorally, kids at that age are so different that we basically couldn’t get the kids to stay still long enough to be able to measure them with our app,” Wang reflects. “One of the common misconceptions in engineering research is that we can always build it to work better with enough resources once a technology leaves the lab,” Wang says. “The issue with that kind of approach is that sometimes that can lead us into solutions that don’t have a chance of working. That is why human centered design being a central loop in the research is so important.”

Wang notesthat keeping the elder user base in mind is crucial in the success of this research endeavor. “One of the things I think is particularly interesting in working on digital technology for the older population is that it requires a lot more nuances around usability,” Wang explains. “Our big hope is that [our app] works with little to no training with either home care providers or with the older adults themselves.”

Wang cautions, however, that these solutions are far from ready and requires extensive research on how well such digital biomarkers can differentiate diseases and how they will ultimately serve in the entire ecosystem of healthcare. “Our research aims to solve big healthcare problems by looking for creative ways to invent new ways our society can screen and treat diseases. But this shift that brings healthcare closer to everyday life, literally into our pockets, means that we will have to be very intentional in our designs of how people will use these technologies to be not only useful, but safe as well,” he says.

Read more about Wang’s research on digital health technologies at UC San Diego.

New Chip Pushes the Power Efficiencies of Data-Converters

Data-converters bridge the physical analog world to the digital domain and are widespread in all electronic components around us—cell phones, cameras, displays, touch screens, wireless transceivers, health sensors, etc. But a longstanding limitation of data-converters is the presence electronic noise—it is one of the primary factors that causes data in the digital world to lose its original pristine quality. One way to lower noise is to burn more power, but that constrains the lifetime of portable devices. 

Chip micrograph

Researchers at the University of California San Diego led by electrical and computer engineering Prof. Drew Hall have developed a clever circuit technique termed 'OTA-stacking' to fundamentally improve the noise-power trade-off in analog to digital converters (ADCs). Their technique is based on the concept of current-reuse where N-fold stacking enables N times lower power for the same noise, which is very substantial. 

Somok Mondal

Their prototype chip achieves state-of-the-art performance in the hypercompetitive data-converter space and is being presented by UC San Diego electrical and computer engineering alumnus (Ph.D. '20) Somok Mondal on Feb. 17 at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC), 2021—the foremost global forum for presentation of advances in solid-state circuits and systems-on-a-chip.

Paper Title: 139μW 104.8dB-DR 24kHz-BW CTΔΣM with Chopped AC-Coupled OTA-Stacking and FIR DACs 

Authors: Somok Mondal, Omid Ghadami, and Drew A. Hall

Gallium Nitride ‘Tangoes’ with Silicon to Overcome Nature’s Material Limitations

Gallium nitride (GaN) is a material that is used for radio and satellite communications in civil and military applications and in solid-state lighting such as LED bulbs. Researchers are also exploring GaN for use in high power applications such as power grids and electric vehicles. The market for GaN power devices is expected to reach $2.6 billion dollars by 2022. However, GaN is not an earth abundant material and only recently, small diameter GaN substrates have started to become available. Researchers have been growing GaN on foreign substrates for almost 5 decades, but the quality of the grown materials is compromised, especially on the standard microelectronics substrate, silicon (Si), which is over 1000 times cheaper than GaN substrates. The origin of the problem is a classical one: high quality material deposition is usually carried out near 1,000 degrees Celsius, but when dissimilar materials are cooled down to room temperature, their contraction can be disproportionate, resulting in the formation of cracks and material failure. This is exactly what happens when GaN is grown on Si. And because the crack severity depends on the thickness of the layers, the thickest pure and semiconductive GaN layer that can be grown on Si is 4.5 micrometers thick — too thin to provide good use of GaN for high power (kilovolt-scale) applications which require much thicker layers (10 microns or more). 

Scanning electron microscopy image of 

crack-free GaN on Si (19 μm thick at center).

Now researchers at the Integrated Electronics and Biointerfaces Group at UC San Diego led by electrical engineering professor Shadi Dayeh have solved this classical problem of thermal mismatches in the growth of dissimilar materials. In an article published on Aug. 21 in Advanced Materials, they combined fundamental crystal properties of GaN and geometrical effects to deflect strain from the crystal planes that usually crack under stress to the surface facets that can freely expand and contract in response to stress. By doing so, they were able to grow crack-free 19-micron-thick layers of GaN on Si — thicker than what’s needed for high-power applications. In the resulting structures, both GaN and Si had exposed surfaces to enable them to move, twist or “tango” together without cracking despite their thermal mismatch. 

Electrical engineering professor Shadi Dayeh (left) and 

Ph.D. graduate student Atsunori Tanaka (right) 

near the GaN MOCVD facility in the Qualcomm Institute 

at UC San Diego.

Thick layers also allowed the crystal defects — threading dislocations — to reduce from commonly achieved 10⁸ – 10⁹ per centimeter squared on Si to 10⁷. And with the high material quality, Dayeh and his team demonstrated the first vertical GaN switches on Si. “This is the result of nearly four years of diligent efforts by graduate student Atsunori Tanaka, who learned and quickly excelled in the GaN metal organic chemical vapor deposition here at UC San Diego,” said Dayeh. “Our graduate students go through a full cycle of rigorous training in all aspects in electronic materials and devices and are prepared to tackle the greatest challenges in this area. A group of very talented students including Atsunori Tanaka, Woojin Choi, who fabricated the vertical switches, and Renjie Chen, who did the electron microscopy, have teamed up to complete the research,” Dayeh continued. Based on this work, Dayeh received funding in July from the National Science Foundation to realize a monolithically integrated GaN power converter on Si.

The growth, device fabrication and characterization were performed at UC San Diego and the electron microscopy was performed at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies (CINT), a Department of Energy Office of Basic Science user facility that provides access to top-of-the-line equipment under a user proposal system.

Engineer Talks Tech with Congressional Staff in Washington, D.C.

Electrical engineering professor Patrick Mercier demonstrates the temporary tattoo alcohol biosensor and other UC San Diego wearable technologies to Congressional staff members.

In the wake of the March for Science, scientists and science supporters worldwide are actively seeking ways to connect and engage with their political representatives, in hopes of bridging the gap between science and public policy.

Patrick Mercier, an electrical engineering professor at UC San Diego, got the chance to do just that at an event on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C. He met with staff members working for representatives for San Diego County and for California Senator Dianne Feinstein. He also showcased research projects conducted under the umbrella of the Center for Wearable Sensors at the Jacobs School of Engineering at UC San Diego.

The event was the BioMedical Technology Exhibition hosted by the American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) in partnership with the Congressional Research and Development Caucus and the Congressional Robotics Caucus. Mercier was among a group of researchers to present their cutting-edge technologies to Congressional staff in the U.S. House of Representatives. The event took place on May 5, 2017.

Researchers from several universities and institutions provided live demonstrations of their federally-funded biomedical engineering devices and technologies that have the potential to revolutionize access to health care. These researchers also participated in 18 meetings with Congressional staff, facilitated by AIMBE — the first step in starting a dialog and becoming a trusted advisor to their lawmakers.

At the exhibition, Mercier showcased several technologies that he, along with nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang, developed at UC San Diego: a temporary tattoo that monitors blood alcohol levels from sweat; a “Tricorder-like” device that can be worn on the chest to simultaneously measure heart rate and lactate levels; and MouthSense, which is a mouth guard sensor that monitors biomarkers in saliva such as lactate, cortisol and uric acid. These technologies demonstrate how UC San Diego researchers are developing wearable devices that can be seamlessly integrated into everyday life to provide continuous, non-invasive and real-time health monitoring.

Left: Mercier discusses NIH-funded research with Congressional staffers. Right: Mercier with Krishna Kandarpa, Director of Research Sciences & Strategic Divisions at the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering.

“All staff members, particularly those in our local offices were very enthusiastic about the technology we’ve developed and are encouraged that investment in NIH research leads to new and interesting devices that can potentially help improve healthcare and lower costs,” Mercier said. Such investment, he said, facilitates commercialization of innovative, early-stage technologies such as MouthSense, which Mercier and Wang spun off as a startup.

Mercier met with a variety of Congressional staff members, including those from the offices of San Diego county Congress members Scott Peters, Darrell Issa and Susan Davis, as well as the office of California Senator Feinstein.

“It was nice to personally explain to these offices that funding NIH (and other scientific research agencies like NSF) has not only a local financial impact, but also a possibility to have a long term impact on healthcare in general. The timing of this event was perfect, as congress just passed an omnibus bill to increase NIH funding, which is now being looked at by the Senate.”

Here’s a list of other technologies showcased at AIMBE’s BioMedical Technology Exhibition:

·         Smart glasses that adjust prescription based on where you are looking (University of Utah)

·         MobiLab: Cell phone-based rapid chlamydia test (Johns Hopkins University)

·         Robotic cane (University of Arkansas at Little Rock)

·         Unobtrusive ultrasound system for blood pressure measurement (MIT)

·         MRI compatible robotics (Children’s National Health System)

·         LASER treatment of burns and traumatic scars (Harvard University and Miami Dermatology and Laser)

·         Real-time surgical guidance in neck surgery using imaging (Vanderbilt University)

Too drunk to drive? This wearable gadget will tell you

A temporary tattoo that can be used to keep track of how drunk you are has become one of the hottest gadgets in the news this past week. The device was developed by researchers in the UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors, led by nanoengineering professor Joseph Wang and electrical engineering professor Patrick Mercier.

The tattoo can be worn on the arm and works by releasing a drug across the skin that induces sweat. Electrodes that have been screen printed on the tattoo electrochemically detect the alcohol level in the user's sweat. The tattoo is powered by a small electronic circuit board (about the size of a stick of gum) that communicates the data via Bluetooth to a mobile device.

Researchers envision this device as a convenient alternative to a breathalyzer, as well as a tool to help prevent drunk driving incidents. For example, the technology could be integrated into a car's ignition interlock software to prevent it from starting if the driver is intoxicated. Or an AA sponsor could use it to check up on a sponsee.

"When you're out at a party of a bar, this sensor could send alerts to your phone to let you know much you've been drinking," said Jayoung Kim, a materials science and engineering PhD student and co-first author of the study.

"This device can use a Bluetooth connection, which is something a breathalyzer can't do," added Somayeh Imani, an electrical engineering PhD student who's also a co-first author of the work.

The gadget has been featured in various media outlets including IFLScience!, BBC World Service, IEEE Spectrum, Yahoo Beauty, Glamour, Munchies, San Diego Union Tribune and NBC San Diego.

Read the full press release and more details about the device here.

UC San Diego Students Fabricate Device to Protect Seniors from a Fall

The AirSave team demonstrated their device during their presentation at the electrical engineering design competition in June

Falls are the leading cause of death from injury among people 65 and older killing more than 400,000 people each year. “This number is projected to increase due to the shift in the baby-boomer population,” said Jun Lu, a recent electrical engineering graduate of the University of California San Diego (BS ’16). “It is a common occurrence, seniors talk about how falling or the fear of falling affects their lives everyday but there is not a widely accepted solution.”

For Lu, that number became real when his great grandmother died after a fall. Together with electrical engineering graduate students Aida Shahi and Borhan Vasli (who are both specializing in machine learning), and Gabriel Frischer, a third year neuroscience major at UC San Diego, Lu created a device to protect seniors from this kind of accident.

The AirSave team took second place at the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s design competition in June

The device, called the AirSave impact protection system, took second place at the UC San Diego Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering’s design competition in June. The competition was part of the university’s Aging and Innovation Initiative and is the result of a collaboration between the Jacobs School of Engineering and the Stein Institute for Research on Aging. The goal for the projects in the competition was to improve quality of life for senior citizens.

Read more from the San Diego Union Tribune

During their research, they found that fatal falls occur mainly due to an impact of the hip, however impacts to the spine, neck and head are also common and can be catastrophic for the seniors. “We wanted to create something all-encompassing,” said Frischer.

The device includes a set of four air bags (one protecting the neck and cranium and three around the waist for hip protection) and a CO2 cartridge from a paintball gun to inflate them just before hitting the ground.

The students are using the resources in the UC San Diego EnVision Arts and Engineering Maker Studio to fabricate prototypes. “We used the 3D printers to fabricate the airbags and the housing for the electrical components, and other tools like the function generators,” said Lu. “It’s a collaborative space, so we were also able to come up with ideas by talking to other students.”

"The AirSave Team was in the Maker Studio nearly every hour that we were open, and it is no surprise that their hard work and dedication earned them top marks in the competition," said Jesse DeWald, the facility’s director. "I think the best part of the AirSave Team using the EnVision Maker Studio, is that they inspired the other students around them to think about these very important problems and to help them realize that they have the tools and abilities to design the solutions to the problems."

“We learned a lot about the process of designing something,” said Frischer. “The biggest lesson was that we needed to design for the people we were making the device for. Initially, we thought we wanted to create a vest, but after talking to seniors, we decided on an exoskeleton.”

AirSave "exoskeleton" design

The change came about after the students spoke with residents at the La Costa Glen retirement community in Carlsbad and similar facilities.

“Everyone has a different style,” said Frischer. “It became clear that the seniors wanted a device they could wear underneath their clothes and still be comfortable. The frame of the exoskeleton is made of impact-absorbing foam, which adds an addition layer of protection on top of the airbags. Our design is unique, light, completely concealable under the wearers clothing and highly protective.”

The AirSave system includes a sensor that collects acceleration and coordination data and determines whether the person is falling, or just bending over to pick something up.

“We’re still working to improve the algorithm,” said Lu. “It’s pretty good though – the only thing it can’t differentiate is the jumping motion.”

When the AirSave team demonstrated their device during their presentation at the electrical engineering design competition in June, Frischer performed an actual tumble while wearing an accelerometer prototype so that the audience could see the rapid acceleration data from the sensor on the screen.

“The next step is to connect the airbag inflation component to the sensing component, which requires a high voltage battery, said Lu, who plans to work on the project full time next year. “The best part is, this is only the beginning.”

You can learn more about the project and how you can get involved here.

Additional Design Competition Results

In first place was the group that developed the MightyCart, a motorized, foldable shopping cart users steer by pressing sensors on the handle, making it easier to handle heavy loads. Ryan Collins, Gannon Gesiriech, Boulos Haddad and Kevin Nematzadeh — known collectively as Fountain of Youth — took home the $4,000 top prize.

The team that took home third place at the Design Competition was Team VITA, which developed pressure-sensitive carpet tiles embedded with LED lights that light a person’s path in the dark and alert others when someone has fallen. The team members were Chao-yu Lee, Wen Li, Pushen Wang and Edward Zhong. 

Computer engineer recognized for his work in computational biology

A professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, San Diego, has received an honorable mention in the 2015 Doctoral Dissertation Award competition presented by the Association for Computing and Machinery.

Siavash Mirarab joined the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UC San Diego in 2015 after earning a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. His dissertation, “Novel Scalable Approaches for Multiple Sequence Alignment and Phylogenomic Reconstruction,” addresses the growing need to analyze large-scale biological sequence data efficiently and accurately.

To address this challenge, Mirarab introduces several methods: PASTA, a scalable and accurate algorithm that can align data sets up to one million sequences; statistical binning, a novel technique for reducing noise in estimation of evolutionary trees for individual parts of the genome; and ASTRAL, a new summary method that can run on 1,000 species in one day and has outstanding accuracy. These methods were essential in analyzing very large genomic datasets of birds and plants.

Mirarab’s research interests focus on accurate and scalable analysis of large-scale biological datasets. 

His work particularly focuses on evolutionary biology and computational methods that use genomic data to reconstruct the evolutionary past. He is interested in algorithmic developments that enable us to analyze very large datasets with high accuracy and with reasonable computational demands. These algorithms find application in various areas of computational biology, including multiple sequence alignment, metagenomics, and phylogenetic reconstruction from whole genomes.

Before receiving a Ph.D. at UT Austin, he earned a master’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, in 2008. He received his bacherlor’s degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Tehran University, Iran, in 2000. In between his studies, he has worked for various companies, including IBM and Cisco.  His Ph.D. research has been supported by a Howard Hughes Medical Institute international graduate student fellowship and by Canadian NSERG PGSD awards.

ECE Student, Professor Win Best Paper Award at NIPS Conference

by Tiffany Fox

Together with his advisor, Professor Alon Orlitsky, Ananda Theertha Suresh, a Ph.D. student in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of California, San Diego, won the Best Paper award at the 29th Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS). NIPS, which took place this year in Montreal, is an international gathering of researchers in the fields of machine learning and computational neuroscience.

Ananda Theertha Suresh

Suresh and Orlitsky beat out more than 1,800 submissions from researchers around the world to receive the honor for their paper titled “Competitive Distribution Estimation: Why is Good-Turing Good?” Good-Turing refers to a statistical technique developed by British computer scientist Alan Turing and his assistant I.J. Good as part of their efforts to crack German encryption codes during World War II. The technique addresses an uncertainty problem called discrete distribution estimation, and makes it possible to estimate the probability of encountering an object not previously encountered, given a set of past observations of objects with different qualities.

By way of explanation, Suresh provides a theoretical example: “Imagine you’re trying to calculate the best possible vehicle to buy, one that will move quickly over all types of terrain -- snow, desert, roads, etc. You will only be buying one vehicle, so you need to optimize for a wide distribution of probabilities.

“With the prior computational approach, known as the MinMax algorithm, you would look at a range of 100 miles and minimize the time it would take to travel on all types of terrain by different types of vehicles. In other words," he continues, "you’re trying to minimize how long it will take in a worst-case scenario. Eventually, you’d calculate that the best possible vehicle would be a tank, since a tank can travel on these worst-case scenario terrains, but a tank is not practical because it can’t travel well on the road, which is where most people are driving. Thus, with the MinMax approach, you lose functionality.”

Prof. Arlon Orlitsky

Another example is a simple coin toss. “You have a coin and you want to find out the probability of heads” explains Suresh. “In a coin toss, the worst-case distribution for heads would be close to zero, but in reality, you’re not likely to have a worst-case distribution. This is often reflected in practice, where the best MinMax optimal estimator performs not as well as some heuristics.”

In their paper, Suresh and Orlitsky showed that instead of favoring the MinMax approach, where one optimizes for the worst-case distribution, the Good-Turing frequency estimation can be used to optimize for every distribution, not the just worst-case. “So if the MinMax estimator calculates you should have a tank, the Good-Turing estimator is like having a Transformer, where whatever situation you’re in, it adapts to it.”

Applications for the Good-Turing estimator include ecology (estimating the probability of animal populations with a certain physical trait, for example) and a field known as natural language processing, which is a branch of computer science concerned with interactions between computers and human (natural) languages. The “autocorrect” function on a smartphone is one example of a probability estimator at work, where the computer tries to estimate which word the user is trying to type, given a set of past observations.

“Good and Turing came up with this estimator in World War II and people have been using it for more than 60 years,” says Orlitsky, who holds dual appointments in the departments of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Computer Science and Engineering. “This paper provides perhaps the clearest explanation to date as to why it works.”

Watch Suresh's presentation at the NIPS conference in this video:

Photo of the Week: Electrical engineering professor Charles Tu connected with an alumni in the airport over the holidays

Electrical engineering professor Charles Tu connected with an alumni in the airport over the holidays

"It was very nice bumping into an ECE alum at the airport on New Year's Eve!" said Charles Tu, a professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. "It had been several years since I'd seen Oluwafemi Akinwale - 'Femi' for short."

Akinwale, on his way to Hawaii for the holidays, is now working at Intel. During his time at the Jacobs School, he worked in the IT unit of the ECE department until it was disbanded.

Are you a Jacobs School alum? Tell us what you're doing now!

Emerging wearable technologies presented at Center for Wearable Sensors Summit

The UC San Diego Center for Wearable Sensors (CWS) hosted its second bi-annual Wearable Sensors Summit on Thursday, Nov. 12. The event featured faculty talks, a student poster pitch competition, a poster session and networking. (View Summit agenda as a PDF.)

Partners from industry including executives from the Center for Wearable Sensor's newest member companies Dexcom and Sabic interacted with UC San Diego faculty and students. Attendees learned about some of the latest exciting research projects in the Center for Wearable Sensors ranging from skin-like electronics to smartphone-based biosensors for portable and personalized healthcare.

Faculty Presentations

One of the speakers at the event was Professor Sheng Xu, who joined the faculty in the Department of NanoEngineering this past summer. Xu spoke about his research on developing new “soft” inorganic materials for advanced electronic sensors that can be comfortably worn on the skin. Faculty talks also featured presentations from computer science and engineering professor Tajana Rosing, nanoengineering professor Darren Lipomi, and electrical engineering professor Drew Hall.

Student Posters and Research

Student researchers showed off their latest work at the Center for Wearable Sensors (CWS) Summit. During the poster pitch competition, 12 students were each given 90 seconds to pitch their research to the audience and were evaluated by judges. The first and second place awards went to Timothy O’Connor and Kirtana Rajan, respectively.

L-R: CWS Associate Director Patrick Mercier; Peter Simpson from Dexcom, a CWS member company; graduate student Timothy O'Connor, the poster-pitch competition first-place winner; Joseph Wang CWS Director; and Manish Nandi from Sabic, a CWS member company. 

L-R: CWS Associate Director Patrick Mercier; Manish Nandi from Sabic, a CWS member company; graduate student Kirtana Rajan, the poster-pitch competition second-place winner; Joseph Wang CWS Director; and Peter Simpson from Dexcom, a CWS member company. 

O’Connor pitched his research on ultra lightweight wearable solar cells, and Rajan pitched her research on electronic hand sensors that wirelessly translate American Sign Language gestures to text on a computer. Both students are members of Professor Lipomi’s research group.

Attendees had a chance to learn more about these projects and others at the afternoon student poster session.

Afternoon poster session

Jiwoong Park (electrical and computer engineering)

Christine Chan (electrical and computer engineering)

Chul Kim (bioengineering)

Alex Sun (electrical and computer engineering)

Jayoung Kim (nanoengineering)

Kirtana Rajan (nanoengineering)

Timothy O'Connor (nanoengineering)

Learn more about the Center for Wearable Sensors at UC San Diego.