Wearable Tech to Provide Greater Control Over Personal Health
UMass Amherst researchers are developing innovative devices to closely monitor a range of health metrics outside the clinic.
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Temporary tattoos to monitor heart rate and cortisol levels. A smart ring that continually measures blood pressure. A vest that alerts when a patient with heart failure may be deteriorating and should seek medical attention. An app that identifies subtle shifts in sleep patterns that may indicate the earliest signs of Alzheimer’s disease, long before any cognitive changes emerge. These technologies offering patients and clinicians new visibility into personal health are among the many remarkable innovations currently in development at UMass Amherst.
With the average doctor’s visit lasting only about 15 minutes and metrics captured in the clinic offering an incomplete picture of health, technologies like wearable devices and instruments for passive, in-home sensing offer invaluable complements to traditional medical care, explains Deepak Ganesan, professor in UMass Amherst’s Manning College of Information & Computer Sciences.
Recent advances in wearable technologies such as smartwatches, rings, glasses, and textiles, coupled with the remarkable rise in artificial intelligence capabilities, make it possible to have unprecedented levels of personal health data at our fingertips. Critically, wearable technologies must be comfortable and unobtrusive for patients to be willing to use them, and privacy concerns must be addressed sensitively.
“In this world of AI, the ability to analyze, synthesize, and take action based on data is just vastly better than anything we’ve had in the past,” Ganesan adds.
“For the past few decades, we’ve been trying to push the envelope by developing devices to collect high-quality, actionable health information outside the clinic,” says Ganesan, who directs MassAITC. “UMass has state-of-the-art research facilities and has built a strong cohort of researchers working in the personal health monitoring space, collaborating across disciplines.”
“Simultaneously, we are using artificial intelligence and data analytics technologies to optimize and improve patient care,” adds Govind Srimathveeravalli, associate professor of mechanical and industrial engineering and director of the Center for Personalized Health Monitoring (CPHM). “Health analytics research, led by faculty in the Riccio College of Engineering, can determine patients who need immediate attention using multimodal data. Researchers are also developing personalized models to design patient-specific treatments and accurately establish good health—a major shift from historical models that averaged population-level health data.”
"In this world of AI, the ability to analyze, synthesize, and take action based on data is just vastly better than anything we’ve had in the past."
– Deepak Ganesan
To take this work to the next level, a group of researchers and administrators at UMass Amherst is now seeking to partner with UMass Chan Medical School on clinical validation of the health monitoring technologies in development. This work is supported by a major gift from Daniel J. Riccio Jr. ’86, ’24MS—a former key leader and innovator at Apple for 26 years—which includes a $10 million catalyst fund to provide flexible support for major university priorities, including research and innovation at the intersection of technology and health.
“At UMass Amherst, we've gotten very good at building the technology, but what we've always lacked is access to patients, clinical expertise, and the real problems that clinicians face every day,” says Ganesan. “UMass Chan brings all of that plus a pathway to move our prototypes into actual care.”
Adds Srimathveeravalli, “The partnership with Chan is vital for successful translation of discoveries and inventions out of the CPHM faculty labs into the clinic. This partnership sets up an important conversation where UMass Amherst faculty research directions are informed by clinician and patient needs, while Chan faculty gain access to technology resources that enhance care delivery.”
In early 2026, a workshop was held to discuss closer collaboration between the two institutions, and several UMass Amherst researchers presented their health technology projects. Read about some of these projects below.
Blood Pressure Measurement at Your Finger
Currently, at-home blood pressure monitoring requires a cumbersome arm cuff. Ganesan and VP Nguyen, assistant professor of computer science and director of the Wireless and Sensor Systems Lab, are collaborating on a smart ring that offers continuous, gold-standard oscillometric blood pressure measurement, which would be the first such device available on the consumer market. They have patented the technology and founded a startup, VYRE. Ganesan and Nguyen also recently had a paper on this technology accepted to ACM SenSys, a top conference in the field.
“From our current study, our technology is really promising. We strongly believe that this will be the future of blood pressure monitoring,” says Nguyen.
Their research found that the strongest arterial response signal for measuring blood pressure can be found on the finger using a ring, as opposed to a watch or bracelet higher up on the arm.
Furthermore, he says, “We believe a ring is the least obtrusive option, so people can wear it continuously over long periods of time.”
With support from a $100,000 Translational Seed Award from IALS, Nguyen and Ganesan are testing a prototype with 2,000
Cardiac Monitoring to Prevent Rehospitalization
Heart failure affects more than six million adults in the United States and is responsible for nearly 15 percent of deaths, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. After patients with heart failure are released from the hospital, careful monitoring is essential to detect changes in their condition and prevent deterioration and rehospitalization.
Yeonsik Noh, associate professor who holds a joint appointment in the Elaine Marieb College of Nursing and the Riccio College of Engineering’s electrical and computer engineering department, is leading a research team in developing wearable devices to monitor heart patients in their home and detect when their condition may be worsening. With support from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the team is building a wearable vest system—designed for greater comfort and convenience, greater accuracy and fidelity, and higher adherence—to measure single-channel electrocardiogram and three-channel bioimpedance spectroscopy signals and extract indicators of worsening heart failure.
Noh is now collaborating with emergency medicine doctors and cardiologists at UMass Chan Medical School to recruit patients to validate these technologies—both in the hospital setting and at home.
Temporary ‘Tattoos’ to Track Health Metrics
What if a barely noticeable, ultra-thin, transparent, flexible patch worn on the skin could allow a person with diabetes to check their blood sugar or help a heart patient track their cardiac activity? Dmitry Kireev, assistant professor of biomedical engineering, is developing temporary “tattoos” made from graphene—a material composed of a single layer of carbon atoms—that can measure heart rate and blood pressure, among other metrics, and even quantify cortisol in sweat.
These patches conform perfectly to the skin’s grooves and ridges, and have caused no side effects in the dozens of subjects who have tested them. With support from the American Heart Association, the National Science Foundation, and others, this work shows promise for managing complex medical conditions, including cardiovascular, metabolic, immune, and neurodegenerative diseases.
In the future, Kireev hopes to use the tattoos to track other compounds in sweat—such as hormones, toxic metals, electrolytes, and inflammation markers. Bringing these “tattoos” to the consumer market will also require integrating them into electronic networks so they can work with smartwatches.
“Our goal is to make health monitoring effortless and continuous, where a nearly invisible tattoo on the skin can provide clinically meaningful data in real time, helping prevent serious diseases before they emerge,” says Kireev.
Read more in this article by Kireev in IEEE Spectrum.
Monitoring Sleep for Early Detection of Alzheimer's Disease
Research has shown that sleep disruption—particularly subtle shifts in sleep “microarchitecture” that can be seen in EEG patterns—commonly precedes the development of Alzheimer’s disease, even before telltale signs of cognitive decline emerge. Joyita Dutta, professor of biomedical engineering, is interested in sleep monitoring as a tool for flagging individuals at risk. This is especially critical because emerging Alzheimer’s treatments are considered to be effective only in the early stages of the disease. But gold-standard sleep assessments are expensive and only provide data from a single night of sleep. With funding from the NIH, Dutta is studying whether simple wearable devices—including an Apple Watch, Oura Ring, and a CGX patch worn on the forehead to collect EEG data—can track sleep continually from the comfort of home.
Dutta and her trainees developed an Apple Watch app called BIDSleep that enables sophisticated sleep stage monitoring by collecting data on instantaneous heart rate, which feeds into an AI model. On average, their model accurately identified the correct sleep stage more than 70 percent of the time, outperforming other well-known approaches used in sleep research. Dutta is collaborating with clinicians at Mass General Brigham to better understand the link between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease using a range of different components, including genetics, blood biomarkers, and metrics from the wearable devices she’s testing.
In the long run, Dutta hopes this research can enable at-home monitoring to detect the development of Alzheimer’s disease—and possibly other conditions linked to sleep disruptions—early on, and even proactively intervene to prevent disease.
“We are particularly interested in the potential bidirectional relationship between sleep and Alzheimer’s disease,” says Dutta. “It’s possible that such wearable technologies can be used to not only alert a patient that they should be evaluated for cognitive decline by their doctor, but [also] help patients modify disrupted sleep patterns for better health outcomes.”
This story was originally published by the UMass Amherst Office of News & Media Relations.
