Bio-Behavioral Sensing: An Emerging Engineering Area

Abstract

There is now a significant body of evidence that links human behavior to human health and well-being. In fact, for some behaviors like smoking, the harm to health is so well documented that it has led to public health policies, such as banning smoking inside buildings. Similarly, there is also growing evidence documenting the health benefits of many behaviors, e.g., regular exercise and healthy eating. However, we are only beginning to understand the deep bi-directional connections between human behavior and biology, largely powered by the rapidly increasing body of knowledge from the field of behavioral epigenetics. Since 2000, an explosion of results are unraveling the two-way pathways of how our molecular biology influences our behavior and how our behavior influences our molecular biology