Chan Earns AHA Career Development Award

Justin Chan, an assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering and software and societal systems, has received an American Heart Association (AHA) Career Development Award. The three-year award supports highly promising early career researchers and scientists exploring innovative questions in cardiovascular health with the goal of launching successful scientific careers.

In Chan's case, the award will help fund research on using AI-enabled hearables to expand access to cardiac monitoring through widely available consumer devices. The project focuses on developing an in-ear cardiac sensing platform that uses standard earbuds to capture detailed heart activity. By repurposing built-in speakers as acoustic sensors, the system measures subtle cardiac sounds at the ear and reconstructs key cardiac waveforms typically obtained with chest-mounted medical devices. (Read more about Chan's research in a recent ECE story about his work, which was featured at CHI 2026.)

The work integrates hardware and machine learning approaches to extract clinically relevant signals, including heart rate and heart rate variability, with the goal of enabling continuous monitoring outside clinical settings.

The AHA award supports the continued development and evaluation of Chan's approach, including testing across diverse users and in real-world environments. The funding reflects the project's alignment with efforts to improve early detection and monitoring of cardiovascular conditions through scalable, accessible technologies.

For more information, visit the AHA Career Development Award website.