(June 2025) NSF CAREER Award for Just-in-Time Adaptive Interventions
We are thrilled to share that our lab has received the National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER award to support our research on designing intelligent, context-aware systems for digital health interventions.
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UbiWell Lab
The Ubiquitous Computing for Health and Well-being (UbiWell) Lab is an interdisciplinary research group at the Khoury College of Computer Sciences and the Bouvé College of Health Sciences at Northeastern University.
We work on developing data-driven solutions to enable effective sensing and interventions for mental- and behavioral-health outcomes with mobile and ubiquitous technologies.
Research Areas
Our interdisciplinary team works at the intersection of mobile/wearable sensing, data science, human-centered computing, and behavioral science.
We work on exploring and advancing the complete "lifecycle" of mental- and behavioral-health sensing and intervention, which includes (a) accurately sensing and detecting a mental or behavioral health condition, like stress and opioid use; (b) after detecting a particular condition, determining the right time to deliver the intervention or support, such that the user is most likely to be receptive to the interventions provided; and (c) choosing the best intervention delivery mechanism and modality to ensure just-in-time delivery and reachability.

A simplified representation of the sensing to intervention lifecycle.
Current Projects
Causal modeling for physiological stress

We are working on various projects to leverage multimodal data and understand the contextual and behavioral factors that lead to physiological stress, and evaluate its association with the perception of stress.
Predicting relapse during OUD treatment

We are working on a longitudinal study to detect at-risk indicators, e.g., stress, craving, and mood, among patients undergoing Opioid Use Disorder (OUD) treatment, using passively collected contextual and sensor data from smartphones and wearables.
States-of-receptivity for digital health interventions

We have multiple projects currently underway to better evaluate the contexts where people are willing and able to engage with and use digital health interventions. These range from behavior-change interventions in free-living situations to interventions during specific scenarios, e.g., driving.
News
(May 2025) Vedant is joining NYU as an Assistant Professor!
Huge congratulations to Vedant, who will be joining NYU Tandon School of Engineering as an Assistant Professor in Fall 2025.
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(May 2025) UbiWell Lab at CHI 2025
Vedant and Ha attended CHI 2025 in Yokohama!
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(April 2025) Jiachen to intern at Microsoft Research
Jiachen will be going to Seattle over the summer to intern in the Health Futures team at Microsoft Research!
(January 2025) Three papers accepted at CHI 2025
Our team has three full papers accepted at CHI 2025, to be presented in Yokohama!
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(November 2024) Jiachen presented a paper at AI for Aging in Place Symposium
Jiachen presented her work-in-progress paper at the AAAI Fall Symposium Series on AI for Aging in Place at Alexandria, VA.
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(October 2024) UbiWell at Dartmouth Digital Health Summit
Several lab members attended the Digital Health Summit at Dartmouth College in Hanover, NH.
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Recent Publications
Show allSiyi Wu, Weidan Cao, Shihan Fu, Bingsheng Yao, Ziqi Yang, Changchang Yin, Varun Mishra, Daniel Addison, Ping Zhang, Dakuo Wang
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2025
Ha Le, Veronika Potter, Rithika Lakshminarayanan, Varun Mishra, Stephen Intille
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2025
Michael V. Heinz, George D. Price, Avijit Singh, Sukanya Bhattacharya, Ching-Hua Chen, Asma Asyyed, Monique B. Does, Saeed Hassanpour, Emily Hichborn, David Kotz, Chantal A. {Lambert-Harris}, Zhiguo Li, Bethany McLeman, Varun Mishra, Catherine Stanger, Geetha Subramaniam, Weiyi Wu, Cynthia I. Campbell, Lisa A. Marsch, Nicholas C. Jacobson
Journal of Substance Use and Addiction Treatment 2025
Vedant Das Swain, Qiuyue "Joy" Zhong, Jash Rajesh Parekh, Yechan Jeon, Roy Zimmermann, Mary P Czerwinski, Jina Suh, Varun Mishra, Koustuv Saha, Javier Hernandez
Proceedings of the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI) 2025
Ohida Binte Amin, Varun Mishra, Tinashe M. Tapera, Robert Volpe, Aarti Sathyanarayana
arXiv 2025