Overview

Research

My research develops ubiquitous sensing and intervention systems to enhance human health and well-being. I work at the intersection of mobile and wearable computing, machine learning, and clinical science through collaborations with medicine, nursing, psychology, and bioethics.

Digital Health

Wearable sensing systems for health monitoring and intervention.

I design real-world sensing pipelines that can capture meaningful behavioral and health signals outside the clinic, with an eye toward systems that can eventually support intervention rather than only retrospective analysis.

Behavioral AI

Multimodal approaches to understanding behavior in context.

I study how speech, mobile sensing, wearable signals, and digital traces can be combined to model everyday behavior, social context, and moments where support or intervention may matter.

Human-Centered AI

Health AI systems designed with stakeholders in the loop from the start.

I am interested in AI systems that remain accountable to the people and institutions around them, including patients, clinicians, and interdisciplinary collaborators. That means building for real-world settings rather than optimizing only for lab performance.

Publications

Public papers, articles, and conference work. For the full record, see Google Scholar.

CHI '26

Inferring Affect and Intervention Opportunities for Cancer Survivors from Digital Diaries with Context-Aware LLMs

Zhiyuan Wang, Katharine E. Daniel, Laura E. Barnes, and Philip I. Chow.

ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Preprint

NDSS '26

From Perception to Protection: A Developer-Centered Study of Security and Privacy Threats in Extended Reality (XR)

Kunlin Cai, Jinghuai Zhang, Ying Li, Zhiyuan Wang, Xun Chen, Tianshi Li, and Yuan Tian.

Network and Distributed System Security Symposium

Paper Preprint

npj HS '25

Stakeholder-Centric Participation in Large Language Models Enhanced Health Systems

Zhiyuan Wang, Runze Yan, Sherilyn Francis, Carmen Diaz, Tabor Flickinger, Yufen Lin, Xiao Hu, Laura E. Barnes, and Virginia LeBaron.

npj Health Systems

Article

CSCW '24

CommSense: A Wearable Sensing Computational Framework for Evaluating Patient-Clinician Interactions

Zhiyuan Wang, Nusayer Hassan, Virginia LeBaron, Tabor Flickinger, David Ling, James Edwards, Congyu Wu, Mehdi Boukhechba, and Laura E. Barnes.

Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction

Paper ArXiv

HEALTH '24

PALLM: Evaluating and Enhancing PALLiative Care Conversations with Large Language Models

Zhiyuan Wang, Fangxu Yuan, Virginia LeBaron, Tabor Flickinger, and Laura E. Barnes.

ACM HEALTH

Preprint

ACII '24

AudioInsight: Detecting Social Contexts Relevant to Social Anxiety from Speech

Varun Reddy, Zhiyuan Wang, Emma R. Toner, Maria A. Larrazabal, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, and Laura E. Barnes.

International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction

ArXiv

CHI EA '24

Rapport Matters: Enhancing HIV mHealth Communication through Linguistic Analysis and Large Language Models

Zhiyuan Wang, Varun Reddy, Karen Ingersoll, Tabor Flickinger, and Laura E. Barnes.

Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Paper

IMWUT '23

Detecting Social Contexts from Mobile Sensing Indicators in Virtual Interactions with Socially Anxious Individuals

Zhiyuan Wang, Maria A. Larrazabal, Mark Rucker, Emma R. Toner, Katharine E. Daniel, Shashwat Kumar, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, and Laura E. Barnes.

Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies

Paper

BSN '23

Understanding Privacy Risks versus Predictive Benefits in Wearable Sensor-Based Digital Phenotyping: A Quantitative Cost-Benefit Analysis

Zhiyuan Wang, Mark Rucker, Emma R. Toner, Maria A. Larrazabal, Mehdi Boukhechba, Bethany A. Teachman, and Laura E. Barnes.

IEEE Body Sensor Networks

Paper

EMBC '23

Personalized State Anxiety Detection: An Empirical Study with Linguistic Biomarkers and a Machine Learning Pipeline

Zhiyuan Wang, Mingyue Tang, Maria A. Larrazabal, Emma R. Toner, Mark Rucker, Congyu Wu, Bethany A. Teachman, Mehdi Boukhechba, and Laura E. Barnes.

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference

Preprint

TOSN '23

Graph Neural Networks in IoT: A Survey

Guimin Dong, Mingyue Tang, Zhiyuan Wang, Jiechao Gao, Sikun Guo, Lihua Cai, Robert Gutierrez, Bradford Campbell, Laura E. Barnes, and Mehdi Boukhechba.

ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks

Paper

IoTJ '22

From Personalized Medicine to Population Health: A Survey of mHealth Sensing Techniques

Zhiyuan Wang, Haoyi Xiong, Jie Zhang, Sijia Yang, Mehdi Boukhechba, Daqing Zhang, Laura E. Barnes, and Dejing Dou.

IEEE Internet of Things Journal

Paper

HDS '22

Mobile Sensing in the COVID-19 Era: A Review

Zhiyuan Wang, Haoyi Xiong, Mingyue Tang, Mehdi Boukhechba, Tabor E. Flickinger, and Laura E. Barnes.

Health Data Science

Article

TMC '22

AFCS: Aggregation-Free Spatial-Temporal Mobile Community Sensing

Jiang Bian, Haoyi Xiong, Zhiyuan Wang, Jingbo Zhou, Shilei Ji, Hongyang Chen, Daqing Zhang, and Dejing Dou.

IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing

Paper

UIC '22

Modeling Crowdedness of Emergency Departments Leveraging Crowdsensing Mobility Data

Tieqi Shou, Zhiyuan Wang, Shang Shi, Dingqi Yang, Binbin Zhou, Cheng Wang, and Longbiao Chen.

IEEE UIC / SmartWorld

Paper

Media Coverage

UVA Engineering

"A Cognitive Assistant on Your Doctor's Smartwatch?"

2023

UVA Today / Nursing

"Watch Your Words: CommSense Prototype Records and Assesses Bedside Conversations"

2023

AAAS EurekAlert!

"A Review on Mobile Sensing in the COVID-19 Era"

2022

Xiamen University

COVID-19 Risk Prediction Model featured at Baidu World Conference

2020