Karan AHUJA

High-fidelity user digitization plays a crucial role in areas such as wellness tracking, activity recognition, rehabilitation, and eldercare. Karan Ahuja’s research has revolutionized this technology, traditionally confined to specialized labs and external motion capture setups, by making it accessible on mobile consumer devices like smartwatches and smartphones.

Karan has distinguished himself by creating novel and practical solutions for using commodity personal devices, such as smartphones and smartwatches, to detect human activity. He and his team have developed a series of human-computer interaction technologies that can perceive, track, and understand humans, which can solve problems in applications such as virtual reality and augmented reality, wearable computing, natural user interfaces, and health sensing.

Over the past two years, Karan’s research has repurposed alternative, minimally invasive, and privacy-aware sensing paradigms—such as Doppler, capacitive, lo-fi audio loudness sensors, and IMUs—already integrated into consumer electronic devices. These technologies estimate high-fidelity user digitization, including full-body poses, activities, and behavioral patterns. This innovation enables anyone with a smartphone or smartwatch to access high-fidelity motion capture with a simple software update, without requiring additional hardware. This makes high fidelity user digital technology more accessible and affordable, allowing people to benefit from advanced user digital technology anytime, anywhere.

Karan's team also developed EduSense, a comprehensive and open-source classroom sensing system. EduSense generates numerous pedological theory-driven visual and audio functions related to effective teaching, providing information for professional development tools. While the system requires time and effort to collect, process, and view fine-grained data to obtain high-quality teaching feedback, it has been successfully implemented in multiple university classrooms.

His activity recognition research has also licensed by numerous Fortune 500 companies and shipped as a product feature. Additionally, Karan has leveraged smartwatches to monitor hyperactivity as a digital biomarker for ADHD, offering a novel approach for early screening and diagnosis of hyperactivity.