Abstract
The success in developing precision healthcare that will be evidence-based, patient-centered and proactive (preventive) will depend, in part, on technological innovations that in turn require solutions to fundamental, multidisciplinary scientific and engineering problems. In response to these challenges, NSF has developed a program in Smart Health and Wellbeing that is focused on stimulating relevant research in key areas, including computer science, engineering, and behavioral and social sciences, reflecting the multidisciplinary nature of these problems. In this presentation I will briefly describe the current program as well as a number of challenges, ranging from the development and utilization of inexpensive monitoring technologies, e.g. mobile health, to the development of sophisticated inference algorithms and economically feasible intervention schemes. I will emphasize the increasing need to understand the relationship between behaviors and health, as well as the notions of behavioral phenotyping and behavioral markers. I will also focus on the need to develop computational predictive models at multiple scales, ranging from molecular biology to behavioral data and social networks. Among the key issues requiring new research efforts, I will identify the need for the development of patient-specific computational multi-scale models that will enable the utilization of heterogeneous, (big) data in conjunction with individual-specific observations and measurements. I will illustrate the model-based approaches with a few specific examples.
Brief Biography
Misha Pavel is currently a Program Director at the National Science Foundation in charge of a program called Smart Health and Wellbeing. Concurrently, he has an appointment as a professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, with a joint appointment in the Department of Medical Informatics and Clinical Epidemiology, at Oregon Health and Science University. Previously, he was a chair of the Department of Biomedical Engineering and the Director of the Point of Care Laboratory, which focuses on unobtrusive monitoring, neurobehavioral assessment and computational modeling in support of care for elders. His current research is focused on technology that would enable transformation of healthcare to be proactive, distributed and patient-centered. Prior to his academic career, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where his research included network analysis and modeling. His current research is at the intersection of computational modeling of complex behaviors of biological systems, engineering, and cognitive science with a focus on information fusion, pattern recognition, augmented cognition, and the development of multimodal and perceptual human-computer interfaces. He developed a number of quantitative and computational models of perceptual and cognitive processes, eye movement control, and a theoretical framework for knowledge representation; the resulting models have been applied in a variety of areas, ranging from computer-assisted instruction systems, to enhanced vision systems for aviation, to augmented cognition systems. He has a Ph.D. in experimental psychology from New York University, an M.S. in electrical engineering from Stanford University, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn.. Misha Pavel is a Senior Member of IEEE.
