Digital Health Research Wins Distinguished Paper Award at ACM Conference

Varun Mishra, Guarini '21, and Professor David Kotz won a Distinguished Paper Award at the joint UbiComp/ISWC 2022 conference for their paper "Detecting Receptivity for MHealth Interventions in the Natural Environment", which was published in the Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies. They were one of five (out of 193) papers published in Volume 5 of the journal that were selected for the honor.

Just-In-Time Adaptive Interventions use digital technologies to provide tailored health support at the appropriate time. Interventions can include messages that prompt or encourage certain activities (eg. a reminder to exercise) or ones that interrupt or discourage actions that can have a negative health impact (eg. avoiding sitting for long hours). In their study, the researchers and their co-authors use machine learning models that equip these systems to gauge the user's recptivity to intervention. By learning when a person may be more receptive, the models are better able to time intervententions and deploy messages when they will be more effective. 

Mishra is now an Assistant Professor at Northeastern University. Congratulations to the winners!