Phuc Nguyen
University of Massachusetts, MA·Computer Science·Early-career
Small computing devices that sit on the body or out in a forest share a common hurdle: they must sense faint signals, run on almost no power, and keep working without someone servicing them. The projects here build such systems in two settings.
- Fields
Computer Science
Engineering
Biomedical Engineering
- Topics
wearable sensing
earables
silent speech interface
- Grants
- 4 known grants, through Jun 2031
What they work on
- Build computational models that translate jaw movement and faint facial vibrations, captured by an ear-worn sensor, into speech sounds and commands so users can control devices silently.
- Design a personalized, context-aware closed-loop feedback system that uses structured knowledge schemas to adapt the silent-speech earable to individual users in real time.
- Develop a reusable gold-coated EEG electrode with humidity and thermal control that holds skin contact resistance low across ten thousand uses, enabling capture of brainwaves above thirty hertz during motion.
- Convert brain recordings into sparse spikes and train spiking neural networks that can be reconfigured at runtime to trade energy for accuracy without retraining.
- Combine on-device seizure detection with a smartphone-based spiking transformer model that attempts to predict seizures thirty to sixty minutes ahead.
- Repurpose discarded smartphones as battery-free sensors using energy-harvesting cases, capacitor storage, energy-aware scheduling and domain adaptation, with field tests on tree canopies and rivers.
- Create biocompatible, ion-sensitive sensor arrays implanted in tree xylem, with energy-harvesting wireless transmission and learned calibration models that predict water and nutrient uptake.
More about the research
One set reads signals from people, including jaw motion during silent speech and electrical activity from the brain. The other reads signals from the environment, including water and nutrient movement inside trees and conditions along rivers. Each combines custom hardware with power-aware software and machine learning so devices can last months or years with little upkeep.
Why it matters
Brain-monitoring wearables could give people with epilepsy and their caregivers advance warning of seizures during ordinary daily life, with possible extension to early dementia detection and sleep tracking. Silent speech sensing could offer private, hands-free control of devices where speaking aloud is impractical. Tree-implanted sensors and repurposed phones could supply growers, foresters and city park managers with cheap continuous data to time irrigation and fertilizer and catch tree stress early, while reducing electronic waste.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
CAREER: Neuromorphic Wearables for Continuous and Robust Neurophysiological Monitoring
NSF · Jul 2026 – Jun 2031
Collaborative Research: CPS: Medium: Designing a Closed-loop Unvoiced Interaction Paradigm
NSF · Aug 2026 – Jul 2029
DESC: Type I: Repurposing Batteryless SmartPhones as Long-lived and Adaptable Sensors for Sustainable and Scalable Environmental Monitoring
NSF · Aug 2025 – Jul 2028
Closest labs
Nirupam Roy
University of Maryland, MD·Computer Science·Early-career
Enable sensing of large-scale gestures and movements near walls, floors and tabletops using coded signal projection through passive acoustic micro-structures and an adaptive intermittent computing architecture for battery-free operation.
Mimi Xie
University of Texas at San Antonio, TX·Computer Science·Early-career
Redesign and optimize tiny machine learning models for battery-less, energy-harvesting IoT devices so that inference and decisions still happen on time under strict power, memory, and computation limits.
Shaahin Angizi
New Jersey Institute of Technology, NJ·Engineering·Early-career
Design reconfigurable circuits and architectures for a multi-modal in-sensor accelerator that moves AI computation onto sensor nodes as efficiently as possible.
The school
University of Massachusetts: 28 labs on PI Pages, $282M a year on research, 337 research doctorates a year.
Reach out
A start for your email. Fill in the brackets.