The Digital Health Institute, a strategic partnership between Houston Methodist Hospital and Rice University to transform health care through innovation, hosted the inaugural ‘Biowear Workshop: Wearables and Assistive Technologies’ at the BioScience Research Collaborative on March 6, 2026. The goal of this one-day workshop was to gather clinicians and engineers from Houston Methodist and Rice to discuss unmet needs and innovative solutions for patients requiring ongoing home-based care.
“My goal in organizing this workshop was to create a forum for close interdisciplinary interactions — where engineers can gain a deeper understanding of the tracking parameters that provide most benefit to patients and their caregivers, and conversely, where clinicians can learn about the latest digital health technologies that Rice engineers are developing and to assess their use for clinical applications,” said Juliane Sempionatto, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University’s George R. Brown School of Engineering and Computing. “Engaging and working closely with clinicians has been crucial for driving my research forward and I wanted to provide a platform that can foster more collaborations for digital health researchers in the area.”
The event included talks and panel discussions by faculty on wearable biosensors, rehabilitation technologies, remote monitoring, and assistive technologies as well as poster presentations and short lightning talks by students and trainees from Rice, Houston Methodist, and University of Houston.
Across these sessions, a clear theme emerged: advancing digital health requires close collaboration among patients, clinicians, and researchers. Speakers emphasized that patient-centered approaches can improve compliance and outcomes, while the rapid growth of continuous monitoring systems calls for better ways to identify meaningful clinical insights from large volumes of data. They also highlighted the need for technologies that give clinicians real-time access to patient data, particularly for managing high-risk chronic conditions such as hypertension and seizures.
The following three students received top honors for their posters:
- Chihtong Lee won first place for her poster, “Wearable Bioimpedance Monitoring of Breastfeeding Enabled by Multiphysics Modeling.” Her project develops a wearable device that measures milk production non-invasively in real-time, reducing uncertainty around output and supporting maternal and infant health. Lee was mentored by Raudel Avila at Rice University.
- Boer Chen won second place for her poster, “Beyond Repetition: A Closed-loop Adaptive Gaming Framework for Personalized Stroke Recovery.” Her project develops an adaptive rehabilitation game framework that adjusts the difficulty of physical challenges based on patient performance, improving the effectiveness and accessibility of stroke recovery in clinics and at home. Chen was mentored by Keya Ghonasgi at Rice University.
- Anirudh B. Harish won third place for his poster, “CogPhys: Assessing Cognitive Load via Multimodal Remote & Contact-Based Physiological Sensing.” His project uses visible light, near infrared, thermal, and radio frequency sensors to assess cognitive load to develop non-intrusive user-friendly driver-sensing systems and in healthcare to aid medical professionals involved in extensive surgical procedures. Harish was mentored by Ashok Veeraraghavan and co-supervised by Akane Sano at Rice University.
The following students received top honors for 3-minute Lightning Talks:
- Sarai Juarez Uribe from University of Houston won first prize for developing soft textile-based exoskeleton for children with cerebral palsy.
- Siyi Wang from Rice University won second prize for developing a smart microfluidics-based forecasting system that measures changes in sweat composition to predict the onset of seizures.
- Jack Kalicak, Boer Chen from Rice University and Sofia Machado from University of Houston received participation prizes.
“In its first year, this workshop exceeded expectations—both in the quality of research presented and in the enthusiasm and collaboration among participants, which I hope will lead to many fruitful partnerships,” Sempionatto said. “Its success is also reflected in an invitation to publish a review of the proceedings, helping clinicians and digital health researchers worldwide build similar interdisciplinary collaborations.”