Rewriting how we study human behavior using wearable sensors that are comfortable to wear, privacy conscious, and highly accurate.
What we do
SenseWhy Inc. is a mobile health technology company founded by a team of leading experts in sensor analytics and digital medicine.
Our work leverages passive sensing and ubiquitous computing to create better tools for lifestyle health care. Our focus is on visual and thermal sensing-enabled wearables that can passively monitor and evaluate eating and smoking behaviors in rich detail.
We work with clinicians and patients to ensure a user-centric design process that caters to the needs of both clients and providers. We innovate to address key challenges in machine learning, user privacy, and human factors.
Eating Detection
Capturing meals and their contexts
By combining visual and thermal sensing in a chest-worn device, we are able to capture and characterize eating events unobtrusively.
Smoking Topography
Thermal sensing to characterize smoking habits
By leveraging thermal arrays and machine learning, we can perform fine-grained smoking topography without interfering with the smoker's natural movements.
Our Team
Mahdi Pedram
Chief Technology Officer
Dana Simmons
Chief Communictions Officer
Chris Romano
Human Factors Engineer
Jeb Sumeracki
Senior Software Engineer
Tommy Cohen
Mechanical Engineer
Nabil Alshurafa
Co-Founder
Josiah Hester
Co-Founder
Board of Advisors
Angela F. Pfammatter
Roozbeh Ghaffari
Research
2022
FaceBit: Smart Face Masks Platform
Alexander Curtiss, Blaine Rothrock, Abu Bakar, Nivedita Arora, Jason Huang, Zachary Englhardt,
Aaron-Patrick Empedrado, Chixiang Wang, Saad Ahmed, Yang Zhang, Nabil Alshurafa, and Josiah
Hester.
2022. FaceBit: Smart Face Masks Platform. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol.
5, 4, Article 151 (Dec 2021), 44 pages.
ActiSight: Wearer Foreground Extraction Using a Practical RGB-Thermal Wearable
R. Alharbi, S. Sen, A. Ng, N. Alshurafa and J. Hester, "ActiSight: Wearer Foreground Extraction
Using a Practical RGB-Thermal Wearable," 2022 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive
Computing and Communications (PerCom), Pisa, Italy, 2022, pp. 237-246
2021
HeatSight: Wearable Low-power Omni Thermal Sensing
Rawan Alharbi, Chunlin Feng, Sougata Sen, Jayalakshmi Jain, Josiah Hester, and Nabil Alshurafa.
2021. HeatSight: Wearable Low-power Omni Thermal Sensing. In Proceedings of the 2021 ACM
International Symposium on Wearable Computers (ISWC '21). Association for Computing Machinery,
New York, NY, USA, 108–112.
2021
SyncWISE:
Window Induced Shift Estimation for Synchronization of Video and Accelerometry
from Wearable Sensors
Yun C. Zhang, Shibo Zhang, Miao Liu, Elyse Daly, Samuel Battalio, Santosh Kumar, Bonnie Spring,
James M. Rehg, and Nabil Alshurafa. 2020. SyncWISE: Window Induced Shift Estimation for
Synchronization of Video and Accelerometry from Wearable Sensors. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob.
Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 4, 3, Article 107 (September 2020), 26 pages.
NeckSense: A Multi-Sensor Necklace for Detecting Eating Activities in Free-Living Conditions
Shibo Zhang, Yuqi Zhao, Dzung Tri Nguyen, Runsheng Xu, Sougata Sen, Josiah Hester, and Nabil
Alshurafa. 2020. NeckSense: A Multi-Sensor Necklace for Detecting Eating Activities in
Free-Living Conditions. Proc. ACM Interact. Mob. Wearable Ubiquitous Technol. 4, 2, Article 72
(June 2020), 26 pages.
News
New 'necklace' could help cigarette smokers quit — Fox 32 Chicago
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Data-tracking necklace helps smokers kick habit — WGN9
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Smart necklace uses heat signal to track smoking habits — The Engineer
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Wearing this smart necklace could help you stop smoking forever — Digital Trends