About
Go beyond a fitness dashboard.
Modern phones and wearables can capture activity, cardiac signals, sleep, movement, and environmental exposure. Your job is to connect those measurements into a coherent story about the user over time.
The application is a wellness and behavioral informatics system. It must not diagnose diseases or psychological conditions.
Platform Flexible
Use Apple iPhone/Watch, Android/Wear OS, or another contemporary mobile/wearable ecosystem that supports your proposed functionality.
Interdisciplinary
Bring together computing, engineering, psychology, human performance, health, design, visualization, and other complementary expertise.
Personalized
Learn what is typical for the individual and identify meaningful changes instead of relying only on generic thresholds.
Responsible
Communicate uncertainty, protect sensitive data, request only needed permissions, and avoid unsupported causal or medical claims.
Challenge Overview
Build one coherent system
The wearable senses the person. The smartphone receives, integrates, analyzes, and presents the information. Your system must address at least three major dimensions of everyday wellness.
Who can participate?
Build a team with complementary strengths
Teams should consist of 3–6 currently enrolled UH students who remain enrolled through the end of Spring 2027. One student serves as team leader for registration, submissions, and official communication.
Students from different colleges and departments may form a team, and mixed undergraduate/graduate teams are encouraged.
Competition Schedule
From team formation to live demo
Each milestone advances the system from concept to a refined application demonstrating integrated sensing, personalization, inference, and longitudinal visualization.
Team Registration
Register the team, team leader, members, and proposed platform.
Concept Proposal
Submit the concept, team expertise, sensing plan, proposed inferences, architecture, and initial interface concept.
Preliminary Prototype
Submit a functioning prototype, technical summary, run instructions, screenshots, and demonstration materials.
Semi-Final
Demonstrate integrated sensing, personal baselines, multimodal inference, longitudinal views, and responsible design.
Final Round
Submit final materials and participate in the live demonstration and interview on April 16.
Award Ceremony
Winners recognized at the Centennial Games Award Ceremony.
Judging criteria
What the judges will reward
Quality of implementation matters—but so do inference, personalization, clarity, originality, and responsible handling of data.
Hardware
Teams are responsible for obtaining the smartphones, wearables, computers, and other devices needed to develop, test, demonstrate, and submit their work.
AI Use
AI-assisted tools may support brainstorming, design, coding, debugging, analysis, and documentation—but the team must understand and defend every component of the submission.
Human Data
Teams may test with their own members' data. Using data from other human participants requires an appropriately approved IRB protocol and applicable University requirements.
Competition Chair
Ioannis Thomas Pavlidis, Ph.D.
Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science
Director, Affective & Data Computing Lab (ACDC)
Competition Chair, Track 06 — University of Houston
About
Ioannis Thomas Pavlidis is the Eckhard-Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science, an IEEE Fellow, and Director of the Affective & Data Computing Lab (ACDC) at the University of Houston. His research combines computing and physiological sensing to understand human behavior in everyday environments, with applications in health and wellness, transportation, education, and human performance. Dr. Pavlidis leads the Affective & Data Computing Lab (ACDC), where he directs interdisciplinary projects funded by the National Science Foundation, DARPA, and other major agencies. A central theme of his research is the use of computational models to interpret latent psychophysiological patterns under naturalistic conditions, including high-stakes decision-making and immersive training environments.
Ready to Register Your Team?
Ensure your team meets all qualifications.
- All team members are eligible UH main campus students for Fall 2026.
- Designated team leader with UH Cougarnet ID and email address.
- Unique team name confirmed.
- Understanding of E10+ rating, AI, copyright, and content rules.
Team Registration
Contact Us
If you have any questions about the contest, please reach out to Ioannis Thomas Pavlidis, Eckhard Pfeiffer Professor of Computer Science at ipavlidis@uh.edu.