Dinesh JOHN
Biography
Dr. Dinesh John is the program director for the Digital Health and Technology Solutions portfolio in the Individual Behavior Processes Branch at the NIA. His portfolio develops aging and Alzheimer’s-related research in areas such as mHealth, passive and active sensing, wearables, affective computing, ubiquitous computing, health information technology, telemedicine, and just-in-time adaptive behavioral interventions. Dr. John has a degree in exercise physiology from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and completed post-doctoral training at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Prior to serving with the NIA, Dr. John and his students at Northeastern University, Boston worked on applications that facilitate a practical and meaningful integration of digital health technology to improve health outcomes during the life-course and in the aging population.
Dr. John is an expert on the application of wearable sensors and other ubiquitous technologies to measure and modify physical activity, sedentary behavior, and sleep. His educational training combined with an in-depth understanding of sensor function, sensor signal response to human movement and physiology, and signal processing, places him uniquely at the intersection of technology and lifestyle disease prevention. This has enabled him to pursue novel applications of technology in health through collaborative work with scientists from diverse fields such as engineering, computer science, behavior change psychology, and public health. Such collaborations have yielded deployable tools to simplify sensor data processing and novel interventional approaches that enable a high level of personalization to enhance sustained behavior change. His work has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Dr. John has served on Scientific Review Groups for the NIH, is a board member for the International Society for the Measurement of Physical Behavior, and is a project scientist for the NIA’s Artificial Intelligence and Technology Collaboratories for Aging Research.