SBME Seminar with Dr. Sayeh Bayat – The World Is the Lab: Sensing, Learning, and Aging Well

Meeting ID: 99196 328761

Passcode: 328761

Location: LSC 1003, Life Sciences Centre – 2350 Health Sciences Mall

Co-hosted by Centre for Aging SMART at Vancouver Coastal Health

Understanding how older adults move — how they walk, drive, and engage with their environments — is fundamental to supporting healthy aging. Yet most health assessments remain confined to clinical settings: brief, controlled, and disconnected from everyday life. In this talk, I present our lab’s work on building computational pipelines that bring health monitoring out of the clinic and into the real world. Our research spans wearable signal processing, GPS-based driving behavior analysis, computer vision, digital twin platforms, and self-supervised learning — all addressing a shared engineering challenge: extracting reliable, clinically meaningful measures from noisy, naturalistic sensor data. I will walk through systems developed by my research group, including methods for reconstructing gait signals from consumer wrist-worn accelerometers, context-aware frameworks for detecting driving safety markers in individuals with mild cognitive impairment, real-time indoor spatial sensing for fall risk and safety monitoring, contrastive learning approaches for deriving personalized mobility signatures, and automated tools for quantifying greenspace exposure. Together, these projects illustrate how scalable sensing and machine learning can transform the messy data of daily life into interpretable digital biomarkers — moving health assessment from the lab to the world where aging actually happens.

Dr. Sayeh Bayat’s Biography:

Dr. Sayeh Bayat is an Assistant Professor at the University of Calgary, where she leads the Healthy City Lab. Her interdisciplinary research sits at the intersection of artificial intelligence, digital health, and aging, with a focus on developing human-centred, context-aware technologies to monitor behaviour, support cognitive health, and enable aging in place. By integrating digital phenotyping, machine learning, and real-world sensing, her work aims to inform scalable and personalized models of care for older adults and individuals living with dementia. Central to her research is participatory design—working closely with older adults, caregivers, and clinicians to co-create technologies that are inclusive, ethically grounded, and responsive to lived experiences. She works closely with interdisciplinary teams across Canada and internationally. Dr. Bayat has received numerous awards, including the 2024 Alberta Immigrant Impact Award (Career and Academic Achievement Category), the University of Calgary’s Research Excellence Award, and recognition as one of the University of Toronto’s “Grads to Watch” in 2022. Her work has been featured internationally in over 15 media outlets, including BBC News, The Telegraph, The New York Times, and CTV. She holds a PhD in Biomedical Engineering (2022) and a BASc in Engineering Science (2016), both from the University of Toronto.

• Social media: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sayehbayat/
• Lab website: https://www.healthycitylab.ca/
• Pronouns: She/her