Beyond Sensor Streams: HALO-Agent as a Body-State Representation Layer for Wearable Agents
WearAgent 2026 · Shanghai
A body-state representation layer that connects continuous wearable sensing with context-aware agent reasoning.
Program details12 & 14 Oct 2026 · Shanghai
Presenting HALO-Agent and MuscleSense at UbiComp/ISWC
Wenbo Zhang · 张文博
Human-Centered Wearable and Ubiquitous Intelligence
PhD Candidate at SCUT · Visiting Researcher at UCL (Mar-Aug 2026)
Wearable sensing has become good at recognising movement, but health and interaction often depend on states we cannot observe directly - muscle activation, loading, and force. I develop multimodal systems that recover these states from practical sensors and turn them into interpretable feedback and context for human-centered wearable agents.
Upcoming
Two Presentations at UbiComp/ISWC 2026
From body-state representation for wearable agents to real-time feedback for muscle-effort regulation.
MuscleSense: Making Muscle Effort Audible for Eyes-Free In-the-Loop Regulation
Session D5: Sports Injury and Performance · Yangtze Hall
A real-time auditory biofeedback system for perceiving and regulating lower-limb muscle effort during exercise.
Program detailsResearch
Research Questions
I study how everyday sensors can recover consequential human states and support timely, reliable interaction.
01
Sense
How can sparse wearables capture movement, physiology, and physical interaction outside controlled laboratories?
PressInPose · Motion2Press · PPGSpeech
02
Infer
How can multimodal models recover muscle activation, loading, pressure, and force that cannot be observed directly?
KineticsSense · HALO · WatchForce
03
Interact
How can inferred body states become low-burden feedback and useful context for personalized wearable agents?
MuscleSense · HALO-Agent
The central challenge is to learn from expensive lab-grade ground truth while keeping sensing sparse, calibration practical, and feedback useful in everyday settings.
Selected systems
Featured Work
Four systems that define my current research direction across sensing, state inference, and closed-loop interaction.
MuscleSense
Making muscle effort audible for eyes-free, in-the-loop regulation during lower-limb exercise.
HALO
Organising muscle activation and biomechanical loading into interpretable body states.
KineticsSense
Estimating lower-limb muscle activation and movement kinetics from sparse wearables.
Research outputs
Selected Publications
- HALO: Inferring Hidden Activation-Loading Organization from Sparse WearablesAccepted, ACM IMWUT, 2026
- MuscleSense: Making Muscle Effort Audible for Eyes-Free In-the-Loop RegulationAccepted, ACM IMWUT, 2026
- Beyond Sensor Streams: HALO-Agent as a Body-State Representation Layer for Wearable AgentsWearAgent Workshop, ACM UbiComp/ISWC, 2026
- WatchForce: Wearables Can Tell How Strong You Grasp From Your WristComputer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine, 2026
- PPGSpeech: A Wearable Silent Speech Interface Leveraging Neck-Worn PhotoplethysmographyIEEE Internet of Things Journal, 2026
- KineticsSense: A Multimodal Wearable Sensor Framework for Modeling Lower-Limb Motion KineticsACM IMWUT, 2025
* Equal contribution.
News
Latest Updates
Presenting MuscleSense in the Sports Injury and Performance session at ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2026 in Shanghai. Event details
Presenting HALO-Agent at the WearAgent 2026 workshop, co-located with ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2026. Event details
HALO was accepted by ACM IMWUT 2026.
Completed a six-month visiting research stay at University College London with Prof. Jagmohan Chauhan.
Gave an invited seminar at UCLIC, University College London: "Beyond Motion: Body-State-Aware Wearable Intelligence for Human Movement and Interaction." Event details
MuscleSense was accepted by ACM IMWUT 2026.
WatchForce was published in Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine.
Presented MuscleSense at MobiUK 2026, University of Cambridge.
PPGSpeech was published in IEEE Internet of Things Journal.
Invited as a panelist at ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2025 to discuss impact, risks, security, and privacy in ubiquitous computing research.
Served as a Student Volunteer at ACM UbiComp/ISWC 2025.
KineticsSense and Motion2Press were accepted by ACM IMWUT.
Received the China Scholarship Council Joint Ph.D. Scholarship.
PressInPose was accepted by ACM IMWUT.
Contact
Let's talk wearable intelligence.
I welcome research discussions and collaborations on multimodal human sensing, wearable intelligence, mobile health, and human-centered AI.