Hi I'm Ken, a PhD student at the University of Toronto specializing in wearable sensing.

👋 About Me

I am a PhD student advised by Alex Mariakakis and Joseph Cafazzo who lead the Computational Health and Interaction (CHAI) lab at the University of Toronto Department of Computer Science and the Centre for E-Health Innovation at the University Health Network respectively. My research focuses on using the sensors embedded in wearable devices and novel machine learning techniques to acquire information relevant to human health as well as exploring how that information is best used to improve health outcomes. I am interested in a broad array of sensing modalities and use cases, please check out my research and projects pages for more.

🏫 Education

  • ⬜ PhD Computer Science — University of Toronto (in progress)
  • ✅ MS Engineering, Data Science, and Information Technology — Tsinghua University (2021)
  • ✅ MS Technology Innovation — University of Washington (2021)
  • ✅ BA International Studies — American University (2011)

🧰 Mentoring and Outreach

📨 Get In Touch

kenc at cs dot toronto dot edu

Research

December 2025

ArtEARial - Arterial Pressure Waveform Reconstruction Using Earbud Audio

IMWUT

A method of reconstructing the arterial pressure waveform using audio recorded by an active noise-cancelling earbud.

audio machine learning earables health cardiovascular
January 2025

Health recommender systems to facilitate collaborative decision-making in chronic disease management, a scoping review

Digital Health

A scoping review regarding health recommender systems applied to choronic illness decision support.

recommender systems machine learning chronic illness health
December 2024

DreamCatcher - A Wearer-aware Multi-modal Sleep Event Dataset Based on Earables in Non-restrictive Environments

Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems

A dataset of multi-subject sleep sounds for use in wearable sleep monitoring system validation.

audio machine learning earables health sleep sensing dataset
October 2024

On the production and measurement of cardiac sounds in the ear canal

IMWUT::EarComp

Heart in your ear? How might that happen?

audio earables health cardiovascular signal processing
October 2024

Understanding wrist skin temperature changes to hormone variations across the menstrual cycle

NPJ Womens Health

This study examines the relationship between hormonal changes and peripheral body tempurature with a focus on nightly wrist skin temperature (WST).

womens health wearable sensing
September 2023

ReHEarSSE - Recognizing Hidden-in-the-Ear Silently Spelled Expressions using Ultrasonic Occluded Ear Canal Deformation Analysis

CHI

Silently spoken (i.e., mouthed) letter recognition using an ultrasonic Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (OFDM) chirp, emitted by an earbud, to detect small changes in ear canal deformation resulting from jaw, tongue, and facial muscle movement.

audio ultrasonic sensing earbuds HCI
May 2023

EarSteth - Cardiac Auscultation Audio Reconstruction Using Earbuds

IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society

A system that leverages consumer-grade active noise-cancelling earbuds to reconstruct cardiac auscultation audio (i.e., a phonocardiagram)

audio machine learning super-resolution health
March 2022

Sleep Sound Classification Using ANC-Enabled Earbuds

PERCOM::HCCS

An ultra light-weight human sleep sound classification method

audio machine learning classification health
February 2022

An AI Driven, Mechanistically-Grounded Geospatial Liquefaction Model for Rapid Response and Scenario Planning

Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering

A series of geospatial models for predicting soil liquefaction infer subsurface traits via satellite remote sensing and mapped information

geotechnical engineering machine learning
November 2020

Induced Acoustic Resonance for Noninvasive Bone Fracture Detection Using Digital Signal Processing and Machine Learning

IEEE GHTC

A low cost embedded system for bone fracture detection

audio machine learning classification health

Projects

🚧👷Under Construction👷🚧