Our Work Is Local, but Our Impact Is Global

Participation in physical activity is associated with better performance in school, but most children do not meet the recommendations of the 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans for 60 minutes of daily moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.

Externalizing disorders, including behaviors such as tantrums, defiance, and aggression, are among the most common and costly disorders of childhood. Behavioral indicators of these disorders often emerge by the third year of life, but current methods of identifying them are often time-intensive and expensive.

We are working with several City of Austin offices to confront the problem of homelessness. People experience homelessness as a continuum, ranging from housing instability to incarceration, couch-surfing to street homelessness, and episodic to chronic.

Incidents of discrimination are a part of everyday life for young people of color, and although many studies document the negative effects of discrimination, we know almost nothing about how it influences health over time. How do experiences of bias and mistreatment play a part in creating racial and ethnic health disparities?

The goal of this project is to build an AI system using crowd-sourced data to help predict the health impacts of different neighborhood environments.  

In order to study the effectiveness of using a blend of sensing technology like smartphone apps and wearable technology, self-reported surveys, and readily available group-level information (grades, attendance), our team developed a study to understand more about the social lives, sleep habits, physical activity levels, and academic performance of 1000 UT undergraduate students in the 2019-2020 school year.

The team originally planned an extension of the UT1000 study to examine the relationship between biological indicators of stress, perception of stress, life events, and lifestyle in UT undergrads. This project addressed these challenges by developing and deploying environmental home beacons, wearable activity bands, and smartphone-based surveys.