About Us
Who We Are
The Computational Health and Interaction (CHAI) lab is led by Prof. Alex Mariakakis in the Department of
Computer Science at the University of Toronto.
Our team has collective expertise across multiple topics within computer science and engineering, but our main
areas include ubiquitous computing and human-computer interaction.
We frequently collaborate with academics in other departments like Biomedical Engineering and
Information Science. Since our work is situated in real-world clinical problems, we also collaborate with
various healthcare stakeholders like patients, clinicians, and global health organizations.
Our Mission
Reactive healthcare systems that respond to medical crises are more costly than proactive healthcare systems
that prevent them. Unfortunately, delivering proactive services to everyone can be challenging due to limited
time, money, and personnel.
Our mission is to leverage technologies already at many people's fingertips to produce effective and
scalable solutions. We do not seek to replace clinicians; rather, we aim to empower them and all those who need
their health monitored to improve healthcare delivery.
Our Approach
We leverage the sensors available on ubiquitous technologies like smartphones, wearables, and VR headsets to
measure and predict physiological, behavioral, and contextual indicators of health. We also generate design
recommendations for these technologies by investigating the implications of deploying them to relevant
stakeholders.
Tackling these problems often requires drawing from multiple topics in computer science ranging from
machine learning and signal processing to human-computer interaction and hardware design. Therefore, our work
can be found at various international conferences (e.g., ACM CHI, ACM UbiComp, IEEE ICASSP) and journals (e.g.,
ACM IMWUT, npj Digital Medicine).
Our Location
You can find us in Room 7230 of the Bahen Centre for Information Technology at the University of Toronto's St.
George Campus.
Enter the south side of the building from College St. and then take the elevators on the right to the 7th floor.
Please contact Dr. Mariakakis in advance if you would like to visit him or the lab. Unannounced visitors
may not always be accommodated due to scheduling and availability constraints.