About Us: Lab Facilities

The mHealth lab is co-located in a beautiful space on the 9th floor at 177 Huntington Avenue, at the edge of the Northeastern University campus closest to the heart of downtown Boston. The space includes our workspaces and the human-computer interaction lab. We are co-located with the research groups of other faculty members working in personal health informatics, and on adjacent floors many groups working in data science, network science, and health systems research. We are a short walk from Northeastern’s West Village H building, which houses other faculty in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences, and Northeastern’s Behrakis building, which is the home base for the Bouvé College of Health Sciences. Behrakis and houses the Exercise Science Lab, which our group has made use of in the past, and the Medical Simulation Center.
Picture
View towards the Northeastern campus from the 9th floor 177 Huntington lab.

mHealth and HCI Laboratory

The mHealth workspace supports the development of mobile health technologies. It is equipped with a suite of mobile phones, smartphones, and wearable sensing electronics. We have facilities and equipment for testing mobile phones and miniature sensors, including electronic shaker equipment, a variety of motion measurement devices (e.g., Actigraphs), tablet computers, and consumer fitness measurement devices (e.g., pedometers, scales). We also have a home-based polysomnography system. In the past we have built and experimented with custom-designed miniature mobile sensors for the body and the home. We have access to a cluster of high-performance workstations useful for conducting applied machine learning experiments.

In our lab space and elsewhere on campus we have access to space for testing human computer interface technologies. These spaces include rooms used for interviewing, observing human subjects, and testing in-home and mobile sensor technologies, as well as additional space for software development computers. 
Picture
The 9th floor mHealth Group lab space at 177 Huntington.

Khoury College Home Lab

PictureThe Home Lab apartment under construction May 2025.
The mHealth group is playing a leading role in developing an on-campus apartment into a fully sensorized home lab. This facility will be used for experiments studying people engaged in home activities in an actual home living space. It will be used to test prototypes of technologies before they are deployed to real homes, and to gather datasets that can be used to drive new research in wearable activity recognition, computer vision, robotics, and human-computer interaction. 

Exercise Science Laboratory

PictureThe Exercise Science Lab has equipment for physical activity and sedentary behavior measurement.
The mHealth group has used the Bouvé Exercise Science Lab to test physical activity sensor systems. This lab has cardiopulmonary function and aerobic assessment equipment, body composition measurement devices, anaerobic power assessment equipment, skeletal muscle strength and endurance analysis equipment, and energy expenditure assessment equipment.

Bouvé Simulation Laboratory

PictureA patient simulator in the Sim Lab.
The mHealth group also has access to the ​Arnold S. Goldstein Interprofessional Laboratory Suite. The facility consists of a set of transformable labs and debriefing rooms. Each lab can be set up as a variety of practice environments including, hospital rooms, operating rooms, exam rooms, office spaces, conference rooms, home care settings or even a dorm room. Each lab contains video and audio capture technology used to record student experiences as they interact with the latest high-fidelity human patient simulators, patient actors, faculty and other students. Recorded simulation experiences can be played back and analyzed during structured debriefing sessions.

Some background on Northeastern…