Welcome to the UCSF TECH Lab! The "TECH" stands for "Technologies Empowering Consumer Health". Led by Dr. Peter Washington, the TECH Lab is dedicated to advancing consumer digital health informatics through human-centered artificial intelligence (AI). Our mission is to develop innovative digital diagnostics, screening tools, therapeutics, and interventions that leverage data from everyday consumer devices—such as smartphones, smartwatches, and wearable health monitors—to provide actionable health insights for patients, clinicians, and other community stakeholders (e.g., educators for pediatric solutions). 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.