Engineering Wellness: Wearable Devices for Precision Medicine Applications

Wearable devices - smartwatches, smart-rings, and fitness bands - have become a powerful tool in preventive medicine, precision health, and early disease detection. What was once a consumer fitness category now generates continuous, multi-parametric physiological data from hundreds of millions of individuals daily, fueling a surge in academic research. This course explores the science and engineering behind wearable devices and their applications in healthcare. Each Stanford student will be provided with a wearable for the course duration. Each week focuses on a major sensing modality or application: accelerometers and activity classification; photoplethysmography (PPG) for heart rate, HRV, and more; sleep classification; skin temperature, breathing rate, and SpO2; gait analysis; and algorithms for early detection of diseases like atrial fibrillation, sleep apnea, and COVID-19. Weekly sessions include a 1.5-hour lecture (often with an industry guest speaker) and a 1.5-hour hands-on lab.