Wearables, LLMs, and Community-Embedded Health Research
Dr. Amir Rahmani, Guest Speaker
July 6, 2026
Dr. Amir M. Rahmani presented "Beyond Controlled Studies: Wearables, LLMs, and Community-Embedded Health Research" on July 2, 2026 at UBC Point Grey.
Traditional controlled studies often fall short in capturing the complexity and diversity of real-world healthcare settings. In this talk, we explore how Living Labs—community-embedded, user-centered innovation environments—can bridge this gap by integrating research directly into everyday life. We highlight the role of advanced methodologies like SMART trial design and a suite of digital health platforms including Centralive, Livi, ZotCare, and Personicle. These tools enable personalized, data-driven interventions by leveraging mobile and wearable technologies, multimedia inputs, and real-time analytics. Building on this foundation, we introduce openCHA, a new open-source platform for agentic conversational health agents powered by large language models (LLMs) and multimodal data fusion. Through real-world deployments—such as community-centered maternity care and stress-level monitoring among students—we demonstrate how AI can support dynamic, empathetic, and culturally aware health interventions. This talk outlines a vision for democratizing healthcare innovation through technology that is personalized, accessible, and grounded in real communities.
About the Speaker
Dr. Amir Rahmani, PhD, MBA is a Professor of Nursing and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine (UCI), where he also holds the Samueli Endowed Chair of Integrative Health. He co-directs the UCI Institute for Future Health, a university-wide organized research unit (ORU) focusing on personal health empowerment. In addition, he leads the multi-disciplinary HealthSciTech Group at UCI. Prior to joining UCI as a faculty, Dr. Rahmani was an EU Marie Curie Global Fellow in the Computer Science Department of University of California, Irvine, USA and in the Institute of Computer Technology of TU Wien, Vienna, Austria. He is also an adjunct professor (Docent) in embedded parallel and distributed computing in the Department of Computing of University of Turku, Turku, Finland, and has worked as a visiting researcher in the department of Industrial and Medical Electronics of KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.
Dr. Rahmani is the recipient of the UCI Beall Applied Innovation’s inaugural Faculty Innovation Fellowship, Nokia Foundation's Research Excellence Award (2 consecutive years), Ulla Tuominen Foundation's research excellence award, UTU's Teacher of the Year candidate, UTU's Rector awarded life-time Docent title, and the European Union's awarded Global Marie Curie Fellowship.
His work spans mhealth, data science, wearable and mobile computing, machine learning and AI, affective computing, bio-signal processing, health informatics, and embedded computing.
