Welcome to the UCSF TECH Lab! The "TECH" stands for "Technologies Empowering Community and Consumer Health". Led by Dr. Peter Washington, the TECH Lab is dedicated to the use of human-centered artificial intelligence (AI) to develop novel digital diagnostics, screening tools, therapeutics, and interventions for a wide range of health conditions that I or my trainees care about. Our projects are focused on both community and consumer digital health informatics. Community digital health informatics is the design, deployment, and evaluation of digital tools with and within community settings, such as clinics, schools, public health departments, and nonprofit partners. Consumer digital health informatics is the use of data from consumer devices such as smartphones, smartwatches, other wearables (think Oura ring for example), and consumer health devices (think blood pressure monitors for example) to derive actionable health insights. Some central research goals include:
Human-Centered AI + Human-Computer Interaction for mHealth and Wearables: We design and study AI systems that interact naturally with people through mobile health platforms, wearables, and other consumer technologies, enabling context-aware, personalized health experiences.
Digital Diagnostics in Psychiatry and Neurology: Our work uses AI applied to multimedia data from smartphones, websites, and wearables to support early screening and diagnosis of behavioral and neurological conditions, such as autism, ADHD, and Parkinson’s Disease.
Digital Interventions and Therapeutics for Mental Health, Chronic Illness, and Lifestyle: We are working towards developing AI-driven, personalized intervention strategies delivered through consumer devices to support mental well-being, manage chronic diseases, and promote healthy lifestyle changes.
Notably, we are an interdisciplinary research lab, spanning medical informatics, machine learning, human-computer interaction including participatory co-design, clinical research, and increasingly, behavior sciences. We welcome expertise in any of these areas. Additionally, our clinical collaborators provide us with clinical expertise in the health conditions that we are passionate about. Our work includes (1) developing computer science methods to enable the next generation of digital diagnostics and therapeutics, (2) creating novel digital diagnostics and therapeutics with clinical and patient input, and we hope to increasingly move towards (3) implementing these digital solutions into real-world workflows in both UCSF clinics as well as outside the clinic.