CP 15: Combining Neural Oscillations Physiology & Privacy-preserving LiDAR/millimeter Wave Sensing Technology to Track Attention States in Natural Contexts

Impairments of attention are common across neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., ADHD), and contribute to negative life outcomes such as in academic achievement. Critically, leading treatment strategies are ineffective at improving educational outcomes. Lacking is assessment of attention deficits in real-life contexts, where visuospatial attention circuitry is influenced by interactions with regulatory systems including arousal and motivation. As such, tracking of neuro-behavioral attention states in natural environments has been increasingly recognized as crucial to: (i) understanding the interaction between neural circuitry of attention and regulatory influences, and (ii) identifying pathways to improving behavioral outcomes. Several technical challenges in this effort exist, however, and include quantification and synchronization of objective measures of such interacting systems with neural indicators of attention, portability of such multi-modal assessment systems, and increasingly, protection of privacy, with video recordings a gold standard in the field. The objective of this R61/33 proposal is to address these challenges. 

CP15 directly supports the mDOT Center’s mission of advancing next-generation mobile health technologies and demonstrating their utility in real-world settings. By bringing forward unique data streams and practical use cases, the project provides an essential proving ground for the Center’s sensing, computational, and analytic frameworks. It allows the mDOT Center to test its methods against real-world variability, strengthens the translational value of its tools, and ensures that innovations developed within the Center are applied to concrete health challenges. In doing so, the CP15 helps reinforce the Center’s broader impact, bridging technical development and applied health outcomes.

The relationship between CP15 and TR&D3 operates through a strong push/pull dynamic that ensures ongoing innovation and refinement. TR&D3 pushes advanced sensing modalities, hardware prototypes, and micromarker computations into CP15, enabling the project to capture highly precise multimodal data streams from wearable sensors and intracranial recordings. At the same time, CP15 pulls from TR&D3 by defining applied needs and constraints, such as embedding robustness, usability in real-world conditions, and performance across diverse data sources. This continuous exchange allows TR&D3 innovations to be validated and improved in practice, while CP15 gains cutting-edge sensing and analytic capacity that directly strengthens its ability to develop neural foundation models.

The collaboration with TR&D3 has a direct impact on CP15 by enhancing both the quality and utility of its data streams. With TR&D3’s sensing systems and computational methods integrated into the project, CP15 achieves higher fidelity and robustness in its multimodal embeddings, reducing noise and missingness that can compromise downstream analytics. This integration also enables CP15 to support real-time and scalable analytics pipelines, advancing its goal of detecting spatiotemporal events that assist with memory formation. As a result, the partnership elevates CP15’s scientific rigor, broadens its translational potential, and ensures that its neural foundation models are optimized for use in naturalistic environments.