Ingenuity Labs Presents: Dr. Nasim Montazeri Ghahjaverestan

Join us for this talk by Dr. Nasim Montazeri Ghahjaverestan

Sleep and Brain Health

Disrupted sleep is increasingly recognized not only as a consequence but as an early sign of underlying health issues. It has been linked to the onset and progression of neurological and chronic conditions, including dementia and epilepsy. In this way, sleep
serves as a vital indicator of brain health. To assess sleep, an intensive process is conducted inside specialized laboratories, involving the attachment of dozens of sensors to record physiological signals overnight. While effective, this method is costly,
limited to a single night's data, and often has long waitlists. Such inconvenient setup canbe intolerable for many populations, especially older adults or those with chronic illnesses. To improve sleep monitoring, wearables have become more widely adopted.
These systems offer convenience and long-term tracking, but often lack the accuracy and resolution needed for clinical decision-making.

This talk explores how artificial intelligence (AI)—particularly signal processing, machine learning, and sensor fusion techniques—can enhance the diagnostic power of wearable sleep data. By leveraging algorithms to extract meaningful patterns from noisy, low-resolution signals, AI can transform consumer-grade wearables into tools capable of supporting medical-grade insights. This intersection is high interdisciplinary and presents a rich area of innovation: from hardware design and embedded sensing to data
analysis, model interpretability, and clinical validation. The talk will highlight both the technical challenges and the opportunities to create AI-powered systems that can quantify sleep and help elucidate the complex links between sleep disruption and brain health.

Dr. Nasim Montazeri is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Before joining Queen's, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the Sunnybrook Research Institute and University Health Network. She received a double PhD degree in signal processing and biomedical engineering from the University of Rennes 1 in France and Sharif University of Technology in Iran. Dr. Montazeri holds BSc degrees in biomedical and control engineering and a MSc degree in biomedical engineering. Dr. Montazeri was a woman entrepreneur and the co-founder of the BioSenseTex, a start-up company with expertise in developing innovative medical textile-based wearables. Dr. Montazeri was the recipient of several entrepreneurship awards, such as "Borealis AI/RBC" for her innovative research on analyzing respiratory system using acoustics and the Entrepreneurship for Cardiovascular Health Opportunities, ECHO" award for developing a textile-based sensor to measure lung edema in heart failure. To date her research has led to more than 40 journal article publications, conference presentations, abstracts and invited talks in major scientific venues such as American Thoracic Society (ATS), European Respiratory Society (ERS), World Sleep Congress, IEEE-EMBS, IEEE-ISSPIT, and Canadian Consortium on Neurodegeneration in Aging (CCNA). Her research interests include the development of medical wearables that promote remote health monitoring, the analysis of health data, and the use of artificial intelligence in healthcare—more specifically in sleep.