Late October, instead of seeing Computer Science Professor Marco Levorato in UCI’s Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS), you’ll find him in Genoa, Italy. On Oct. 18, 2022, he will be giving a keynote talk at IEEE Healthcom, a premiere IEEE conference on e-health networking, application and services.

“I am truly honored and excited by the opportunity to give the keynote speech at IEEE Healthcom 2022, a flagship IEEE conference in the area of mobile healthcare,” says Levorato. His keynote, “Personalized Stress Management for Pregnant Women from Underserved Communities,” will cover insights from the UNITE project, a multidisciplinary effort exploring how to integrate traditional maternal care with low-cost Internet of Things (IoT)-based monitoring and intervention.

“I will discuss our effort and outcomes toward the development of a system for real-time clinical-level monitoring and intervention in everyday settings — an objective that presents several technical challenges,” says Levorato. “The goal of the system is to improve the self-management of pregnant women from underserved communities with limited access to maternal care — for instance, by monitoring and improving stress patterns.”

Levorato will discuss the multitiered edge cloud the UNITE team has built to collect signals from wearable and mobile sensors, as well as techniques deployed to support information flow and real-time analysis despite computing constraints. He also plans to illustrate the need for personalized algorithms, which require context-aware approaches to real-time data collection.

More information about the UNITE project is online, outlining the approaches and technologies being investigated to better support underserved mothers in Orange County, California.

— Shani Murray