Justin Chan: In the global context, the country in which you are born has a huge impact on your ability to access basic medical resources. Within the USA, the zip code that you live in can markedly affect healthcare quality and life expectancy. In this ...

The pervasive computing research community has successfully explored and deployed techniques that use sensors in wearable devices and smartphones to understand our behavior, fitness, and health. Examples are sensors, such as inertial measurement units and ...

The COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated pervasive computing research and development resulting in new, impactful public health tools, including digital contact tracing, crowd dynamics analysis, and symptom tracking, which are broadly recognized by the public ...

In the future, it is possible that universities could use sensing devices to help manage students and classroom disruptions during pandemics. Wearable sensing devices have shown the capability to identify oncoming illnesses. In particular, the Oura Ring, ...

Academic publishing is at a pivotal juncture. Generative AI models have fundamentally transformed the way we create, consume, and disseminate information. With the capability to produce expansive text in real time, these models demonstrate their potential ...

With the advent of new wearables, novel sensing modalities, and portable neuroimaging technologies, we're presented with new opportunities to enhance human cognition. New systems in a range of form factors can help us direct and optimise our natural ...

How can we make conferences inclusive hybrid events that support training and education? We explore this question through the lens of experiences that we gained by organizing a small hybrid conference. We identify lessons learned, focusing on (1) ...

Music therapy has emerged recently as a successful intervention that improves patient outcomes in a large range of neurological and mood disorders without adverse effects. Brain networks are entrained to music in ways that can be explained both via top-...

This article introduces the Emteq's OCOsenseTM smart glasses equipped with a novel noncontact OCOTM sensor technology for measuring facial muscle activation and expressions based on high-resolution tracking of skin movement. We demonstrate that the OCOTM ...

Algorithms increasingly curate the information we see online, prioritizing attention and engagement. By catering to personal preferences, they confirm existing opinions and reinforce cognitive biases. When it comes to polarizing topics such as climate ...

Technologies already provide people with sophisticated and powerful digital ecosystems for lifelong and life-wide education. This article identifies grand challenges for ubiquitous and pervasive computing researchers to transform future education. It ...

The articles in this special section focus on new applications for pervasive computing.

Monitoring human behavior and health status using mobile devices, a.k.a. Mobile Health, has gained increasing attention from both academia and industry in recent years. It allows imperceptible health tracking from the users and remote health management ...

In this piece, Maria Ebling interviews former colleague Michael Rogan about the experiences that led him to enter the field of digital health. Michael is a neuroscientist, mental health clinician, and digital health specialist at Greenphire who focuses on ...

In the foreseeable future, mobile and wearable computing technology with an augmented reality (AR) interface can provide an omnipresent, environmentally adaptive, and everyday reality augmentation. This new pervasive AR technology will lead to a ...

Littering is a significant challenge for environmental sustainability and a major burden for cities and densely populated areas. Current solutions for litter monitoring, such as litter watch campaigns and city-operated litter collection, are costly and ...

Personal informatics systems can help people promote their health and well-being. Recent studies have shown that such systems can be used to infer relevant health indicators such as, e.g., stress, anxiety, and sleeping habits. While automatic detection of ...

Adults over the age of 60 years are a rising population at-risk for depression, and there is a need to create automatic screening for this illness. Most existing voice-based depression datasets comprise speakers younger than 60 and variations in speech ...