Chelsea Dobbins

Associate Professor Chelsea Dobbins holds a faculty position at the University of Queensland (UQ), leading the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science as Director of Teaching and Learning. Previously, she served as a Senior Lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University (UK). Her expertise spans Software Engineering, Digital Signal Processing, and Human-Computer Interaction with a focus on emotion detection via wearable sensors and lifelogging technologies.

Education:

• Bachelor (Honours) of Science (Advanced) from Liverpool John Moores University
• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) from Liverpool John Moores University

Research Interests: Dr. Dobbins’ work integrates affective computing, digital health, and pervasive computing. Core areas include emotion detection through mobile/wearable sensors, lifelogging for memory augmentation, physiological computing, and applications in healthcare. Her research has been supported by the UK’s EPSRC, notably for developing mobile platforms to detect negative emotions during driving.

Key Contributions: She pioneered studies on neuroadaptive gaming for pain distraction, smartwatch battery utilization analysis, and machine learning frameworks for fatigue detection. Her 2016 ACM award-winning work addressed multivariate mobile data mining.

Impact:

• Featured in New Scientist and Times Higher Education
• Case study highlighted on Shimmer’s platform
• Active in interdisciplinary collaborations, bridging engineering, healthcare, and cognitive science

Future Directions: Current projects explore wearable devices in cystic fibrosis management and immersive VR presence measurement. She advocates for health professional education via FHIR-based platforms and continues advancing human-centered computing solutions.