Research
City Science

Looking beyond smart cities
Research
Responsive Environments

Augmenting and mediating human experience, interaction, and perception with sensor networks
Research
Open Ocean

Open Ocean
Research
Fluid Interfaces

Designing systems for cognitive enhancement
Research
Scalable Cooperation

Reimagining human cooperation in the age of social media and artificial intelligence
Project Research

Wearable and Biometric Olfactory Interfaces for Day and Night

Human-computer interaction (HCI) has traditionally focused on designing and investigating interfaces that provide explicit visual, audito...
Research
Affective Computing

Advance human wellbeing by developing new ways to communicate, understand, and respond to emotion
Research
Conformable Decoders

Converting the patterns of nature and the human body into beneficial signals and energy
Research
PlusMinus

PlusMinus
Research
Signal Kinetics

Extending human and computer abilities in sensing, communication, and actuation through signals and networks
Project Research

AttentivU

[Update 02/04/2020: This project has open positions for UROPs/visiting students or interns. One position focuses around electrical engine...
Publication Research

Probabilistic Latent Variable Modeling for Assessing Behavioral Influences on Well-Being

Nosakhare, E., Picard, R. W. Probabilistic Latent Variable Modeling for Assessing Behavioral Influences on Well-Being," ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD ’19), August 4–8, 2019, Anchorage, AK, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/3292500.3330738
Publication Research

Towards Assessing and Recommending Combinations of Behaviors for Improving Health and Well-Being

Nosakhare, E., and Picard. R. 2019. Toward Assessing and Recommending Combinations of Behaviors for Improving Health and Well-Being. ACM Trans. Comput. Healthcare 1, 1, Article 4 (December 2019), 29 pages.
Project Research

Agonist-antagonist Myoneural Interface (AMI)

Humans can accurately sense the position, speed, and torque of their limbs, even with their eyes shut. This sense, known as proprioceptio...
Research
Sculpting Evolution

Cultivating wisdom through evolutionary and ecological engineering
Research
Human Dynamics

Exploring how social networks can influence our lives in business, health, governance, and technology adoption and diffusion
Archived
Project Research

ambienBeat: Mobile tactile biofeedback for subliminal heart rate rhythmic regulation

We present a mobile heart rate regulator—ambienBeat—which provides closed-loop ambient biofeedback via subliminal tactile stimulus based ...
Archived
Project Research

Thinking Cap

Peoples' mindsets, meaning their beliefs about their own intellectual abilities, affect their effort and thereby their performance on tas...
Project Research

Personal Food Computer

The OpenAg™ Personal Food Computer is a tabletop-sized, controlled environment agriculture technology platform that uses robotic systems ...
Research
Biomechatronics

Enhancing human physical capability
Project Research

Essence

The sense of smell is perhaps the most pervasive of all senses, but it is also one of the least understood and least exploited in HCI. We...
Project Research

BioEssence

A wearable olfactory display that monitors cardio-respiratory information with the aspiration to support mental wellbeing.BioEssence is a...
Publication Research

Essence: Olfactory Interfaces for Unconscious Influence of Mood and Cognitive Performance

Judith Amores and Pattie Maes. 2017. Essence: Olfactory Interfaces for Unconscious Influence of Mood and Cognitive Performance. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17). ACM, Denver, CO, USA. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3026004
Publication Research

BioEssence: A Wearable Olfactory Display that Monitors Cardio-Respiratory Information to Support Mental Wellbeing

Amores, J., Hernandez, J., Dementyev, A., Wang, X., Maes, P. "BioEssence: A Wearable Olfactory Display that Monitors Cardio-respiratory Information to Support Mental Wellbeing," Proceedings of the International Conference of IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), Honolulu, Hawaii, July 2018
Project Research

PAL: a wearable on-device deep learning platform for personalized, context-aware, and closed-loop real-time support

OverviewPAL is a  wearable platform for personalized, context-aware, and always-present user change.  PAL has mu...
Project Research

Dormio: Interfacing with Dreams

InspirationSleep is a forgotten country of the mind. A vast majority of our technologies are built for our waking state, even though a th...
Project Research

Theme | Wearable Biotech Enhancement

Lab on Body, Synthetic Biology, and Bio-Digital Systems for Health and Human Enhancement
Research
Open Agriculture (OpenAg)

Open Agriculture Initiative (OpenAg)
Project Research

AttentivU: Towards Improved Wellbeing in the Car

Several research projects have recently explored the use of physiological sensors such as electroencephalography (EEG - brain activity) o...
Project Research

Mice Against Ticks - Preventing tick-borne disease by permanently immunizing mice

Lyme disease is the most common vector-borne infection in North America. People are infected when bitten by ticks; ticks are typically in...
Publication Research

Improving Students' Daily Life Stress Forecasting using LSTM Neural Networks

Umematsu, T., Sano, A., Taylor, S., and Picard, R. "Improving Students' Daily Life Stress Forecasting using LSTM Neural Networks.", 2019 IEICE Society Conference, Japan, September 2019.
Project Research

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Pain Management

Opioid therapy is the cornerstone of management of pain in the ICU. However, opioids present numerous side effects and are highly addicti...
Research
Personal Robots

Building socially engaging robots and interactive technologies to help people live healthier lives, connect with others, and learn better
Article Research

Ticks: They’re not just for hikers anymore

The menacing mites have invaded suburban backyards and even parts of Boston. And Lyme disease isn’t the only thing they carry.
Article Research

A community-guided genome editing project can fight Lyme disease

Kevin Esvelt writes about the Sculpting Evolution group’s project to immunize mice against Lyme disease through gene editing.
Archived
Research
Advancing Wellbeing

Advancing Wellbeing
Article Research

Opioid epidemic may have new nemesis in AI-based ‘deep reinforcement learning’

In the new study, PhD candidate Daniel Lopez-Martinez of MIT and colleagues used data from more than 40,000 hospitalizations
Article Research

Decoding physical patterns of our bodies via conformable devices

In an interview with Medgadget, Canan Dagdeviren talks about the mission and ethos of Conformable Decoders
Article Research

Using AI to manage opioid use in hospital ICUs

New Harvard-MIT deep reinforcement learning algorithm optimizes pain management.
Article Research

J-WAFS announces seven new seed grants

Nine MIT principal investigators will receive grants totaling over $1 million for research focused on global food and water challenges.
Publication Research

Social Robots for Hospitalized Children

Logan, Deirdre, et al. "Social Robots for Hospitalized Children." Pediatrics 143.6 (2019).
Project Research

Huggable: A social robot for pediatric care

The Huggable is a new type of robotic companion for health care, education, and social communication applications. The Huggable is much m...
Article Research

RFID stickers could signal contaminated food

MIT researchers have found a way to check many items instantly, non-invasively, and from a distance—using the RFID tags.
Post Research

Affective Computing researchers win Best Paper Award at IEEE BHI 2019

"Improving Students' Daily Life Stress Forecasting using LSTM Neural Networks," by Terumi Umematsu, Akane Sano, Sara Taylor, an...
Publication Research

Improving Students' Daily Life Stress Forecasting using LSTM Neural Networks

Umematsu, T., Sano, A., Taylor, S., and Picard, R. "Improving Students' Daily Life Stress Forecasting using LSTM Neural Networks." IEEE International Conference on Biomedical and Health Informatics (BHI), Chicago, Illinois, May 2019. (BEST PAPER AWARD - 1st Prize)
Project Research

Improving wellbeing prediction performance using temporal machine learning models

This project aims to improve the prediction accuracy of wellbeing (stress, mood, and health levels) using temporal machine learning model...
Project Research

SNAPSHOT Study

The SNAPSHOT study seeks to measure Sleep, Networks, Affect, Performance, Stress, and Health using Objective Techniques. It is an NIH-fun...
Project Research

The Guardians

The Guardians project aims to use the same game design principles used in mobile game platforms to create greater engagement with individ...
Post Research

Space Health Wearables

Designing Wearables for Space Exploration
Project Research

Personalized Emotional Wellness Coach

The diagnosis and tracking of mood disorders still rely on clinical assessments, originating more than 50 years ago, of self-reported dep...
Archived
Project Research

Make the Breast Pump Not Suck Hackathon 2018

A Case for Breastfeeding InnovationBreastfeeding saves lives.If women globally were able to meet the WHO's public health goal to exclusiv...
Project Research

Identifying the human impacts of climate change

Climate change is going to alter the environments that we depend on in myriad ways. We're using data to identify and quantify these poten...
Project Research

Predicting students' wellbeing from physiology, phone, mobility, and behavioral data

The goal of this project is to apply machine learning methods to model the wellbeing of MIT undergraduate students. Extensive data is obt...
Project Research

BrightBeat: Effortlessly influencing breathing for cultivating calmness and focus

The relationship between breathing and self-reported stress is bidirectional. Respiration pattern is an indicator of stress, but it can a...
Project Research

SkinBot: A wearable, skin-climbing robot

We introduce SkinBot: a lightweight robot that moves over the skin's surface with a two-legged suction-based locomotion mechanism and cap...
Project Research

HeartBit

HeartBit is an interface designed for haptic heart rate biofeedback. A handheld heart beats alongside your own, mirroring the size, weigh...
Publication Research

Stress measurement using speech: Recent advancements, validation issues, and ethical and privacy considerations

Slavich G.M., Taylor S., Picard R.W. "Stress measurement using speech: Recent advancements, validation issues, and ethical and privacy considerations," Stress, 2019.
Project Research

LeakyPhones

LeakyPhones is a public/private headset that was designed to encourage face-to-face interactions, curiosity, and healthier ...
Article Research

The data is in. Frogs don’t boil. But we might.

The metaphor of the frog in water that is heated slowly has long been used to describe the potential risk of climate change.
Article Research

Mood-forecasting tech could help stop bad moods even before they strike

Wearable devices might even help prevent suicide by giving a heads-up about worrisome behavior.
Project Research

RFIQ: Food quality and safety detection using wireless stickers

​We have developed a wireless system that leverages the inexpensive RFID tags already on hundreds of billions of products to sense potent...
Article Research

My Deep Sea, My Backyard: Empowering nations to study the deep

The deep sea is the common heritage of all of humankind and we must all share in the responsibility to be good stewards of it.
Article Research

Putting food-safety detection in the hands of consumers

Simple, scalable wireless system uses the RFID tags on billions of products to sense contamination.
Article Research

Byte-sized: how tech is revolutionizing food production

"Food computers" can tell us everything we need to know about what we grow and eat.
Article Research

As global temperatures rise, so will mental health issues, study says

Small rises in temperature and dramatic weather events resulting from warming can affect mental health.
Project Research

Physio FreeFall

This project seeks to examine the effects of altered gravity on an individual’s physiology during parabolic flight. Specifically, we will...
Project Research

My Deep Sea, My Backyard

Seventy percent of nations have deep-sea environments within their maritime Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), yet only 16 percent of them ...
Archived
Project Research

Masque

 When the body senses itself internally and localizes its actions, it provides the basis for a material sense of self-existence. At ...
Archived
Publication Research

Epidermal Robots: Wearable Sensors that Climb on The Skin

Dementyev A., Hernandez J., Choi I., Follmer S., Paradiso J., "Epidermal Robots: Wearable Sensors That Climb On The Skin" In Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, 2 (3), September 2018.
Publication Research

Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change

Obradovich, N., Migliorini, R., Paulus, M. P., & Rahwan, I. (2018). Empirical evidence of mental health risks posed by climate change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1801528115