Amir M. Rahmani
Biography
Amir M. Rahmani, Ph.D., MBA, is Samueli Endowed Chair in Integrative Health at the Susan Samueli Integrative Health Institute and Sue & Bill Gross School of Nursing at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds a professorship and joint appointments in the Department of Computer Science and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. Rahmani leads the Health SciTech Group and serves as Associate Director of the Institute for Future Health at UC Irvine. He received his Ph.D. in Information and Communication Technology from the University of Turku, Finland, and an MBA with a major in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in ICT from a joint program between Turku School of Economics and the European Institute of Innovation & Technology ICT Labs. His research focuses on digital health technologies and Internet-of-Things applications for healthcare, with over 350 publications that have garnered more than 14,000 citations.
Rahmani has secured over $20 million in external research funding as principal investigator or co-investigator from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, European Union's Horizon 2020, and Academy of Finland. His projects span diverse areas including wearable technology interventions for dementia caregivers, privacy-preserving biometric systems, maternal health monitoring, and smart connected healthcare systems. He was awarded a Marie Curie Global Fellowship by the European Union in 2016 with a score of 94.5%, placing him among the top performers in a program with a success rate below 10% EU-wide.
Rahmani was elected as an ACM Distinguished Member in 2023 and elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2017. He has been recognized among the top 2% of scientists worldwide by Stanford University annually from 2020 to 2024. He holds a lifetime Docent title from the University of Turku and serves as Associate Editor of ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare and on the editorial review board of Nature Scientific Reports. Rahmani has received multiple best paper awards from conferences including IEEE/ACM CHASE, IEEE ISQED, and IEEE DFT Symposium, and has served on grant review panels for organizations including the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, European Research Council, and Belgium's National Fund for Scientific Research.
Return to topEducation
- PhD in Information and Communication Technology, University of Turku, 2012
- MSc in Computer Engineering, University of Tehran, 2009
- MBA in Innovation and Entrepreneurship in ICT, Turku School of Economics, University of Turku and European Institute of Innovation & Technology (EIT) ICT Labs, 2014
Distinctions
- Top 2% of Scientists in the World, Stanford University, 2020-2024
- ACM Distinguished Member Recognition, 2023
- Samueli Endowed Chair in Integrative Health, 2025
- Global Marie Curie Fellowship, European Union, 2016
- IEEE Senior Member, 2017
- UCI Beall Applied Innovation's inaugural Faculty Innovation Fellowship, 2020
- Editor's Choice Award, Elsevier Future Generation Computer Systems, 2022
- Best Paper Award, IEEE/ACM CHASE, 2025
- Best Paper Award Runners-Up, IEEE/ACM CHASE, 2023
- Best Paper Award, IEEE International Symposium on Quality Electronic Design (ISQED), 2022
Areas of Expertise
- Digital Health Technology
- Wearable Sensor Networks
- Internet of Things Healthcare
- Embedded System Architecture
- Privacy Preserving Generative Models
- Dementia Caregiver Intervention
- Postpartum Hemorrhage Monitoring
Recent Publications
- Yang Z., Rahmani A.M., “Personalized Causal Graph Reasoning for LLMs: An Implementation for Dietary Recommendations” (opens in new tab), IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, vol. 29, pp. 8767-8774, 2025.
- Azimi I., Qi M., Wang L., Rahmani A.M., Li Y., “Evaluation of LLMs accuracy and consistency in the registered dietitian exam through prompt engineering and knowledge retrieval” (opens in new tab), Scientific Reports, vol. 15, 2025.
- Abbasian M., Azimi I., Rahmani A.M., Jain R., “Conversational health agents: A personalized large language model-powered agent framework” (opens in new tab), JAMIA Open, vol. 8, 2025.
- Nagesh N., Wang Z., Rahmani A.M., “FairCauseSyn: Towards Causally Fair LLM-augmented Synthetic Data Generation” (opens in new tab), Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Annual International Conference, vol. 2025, pp. 1-6, 2025.
- Feli M., Azimi I., Liljeberg P., Rahmani A.M., “An LLM-Powered Agent for Physiological Data Analysis: A Case Study on PPG-based Heart Rate Estimation” (opens in new tab), Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Annual International Conference, vol. 2025, pp. 1-7, 2025.
- Wang Z., Khatibi E., Firouzi F., Mousavi S.R., Chakrabarty K., Rahmani A.M., “Linkage Attacks Expose Identity Risks in Public ECG Data Sharing” (opens in new tab), Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Annual International Conference, vol. 2025, pp. 1-7, 2025.
- Feli M., Kazemi K., Azimi I., Liljeberg P., Rahmani A.M., “Multitask learning approach for PPG applications: Case studies on signal quality assessment and physiological parameters estimation” (opens in new tab), Computers in Biology and Medicine, vol. 188, 2025.
- Kazemi K., Azimi I., Liljeberg P., Rahmani A.M., “Respiration Rate Estimation via Smartwatch-based Photoplethysmography and Accelerometer Data: A Transfer Learning Approach” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive Mobile Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies, vol. 9, 2025.
- Alikhani H., Kanduri A., Liljeberg P., Rahmani A.M., Dutt N., “Invited Paper: Mindful AI for Pervasive Health and Wellbeing (PHW)” (opens in new tab), IEEE ACM International Conference on Computer Aided Design Digest of Technical Papers Iccad, 2025.
- Subramanian A., Cao R., Naeini E.K., Aqajari S.A.H., Hughes T.D., Calderon M.-D., Zheng K., Dutt N., Liljeberg P., Salantera S., Nelson A.M., Rahmani A.M., “Multimodal Pain Recognition in Postoperative Patients: Machine Learning Approach” (opens in new tab), Jmir Formative Research, vol. 9, 2025.
- Borelli J.L., Wang Y., Li F.H., Russo L.N., Tironi M., Yamashita K., Zhou E., Lai J., Nguyen B., Azimi I., Marcotullio C., Labbaf S., Jafarlou S., Dutt N., Rahmani A., “Detection of Depressive Symptoms in College Students Using Multimodal Passive Sensing Data and Light Gradient Boosting Machine: Longitudinal Pilot Study” (opens in new tab), Jmir Formative Research, vol. 9, 2025.
- Park J.I., Aqajari S.A.H., Rahmani A.M., Lee J.-A., “Predicting Sleep Quality in Family Caregivers of Dementia Patients From Diverse Populations Using Wearable Sensor Data” (opens in new tab), CIN Computers Informatics Nursing, vol. 43, 2024.
- Huang Y., Cao R., Hughes T., Rahmani A., “Smart pain relief: Harnessing conservative Q learning for personalized and dynamic pain management” (opens in new tab), Smart Health, vol. 34, 2024.
- Feli M., Azimi I., Sarhaddi F., Sharifi-Heris Z., Niela-Vilen H., Liljeberg P., Axelin A., Rahmani A.M., “Preterm birth risk stratification through longitudinal heart rate and HRV monitoring in daily life” (opens in new tab), Scientific Reports, vol. 14, 2024.
- Abbasian M., Khatibi E., Azimi I., Oniani D., Shakeri Hossein Abad Z., Thieme A., Sriram R., Yang Z., Wang Y., Lin B., Gevaert O., Li L.-J., Jain R., Rahmani A.M., “Foundation metrics for evaluating effectiveness of healthcare conversations powered by generative AI” (opens in new tab), Npj Digital Medicine, vol. 7, 2024.
- Mehrabadi M.A., Khatibi E., Jimah T., Labbaf S., Borg H., Narvaez L., Pimentel P., Turner A., Dutt N., Guo Y., Rahmani A.M., “PERFECT: Personalized Exercise Recommendation Framework and architECTure” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare, vol. 5, 2024.
- Sharifi-Heris Z., Fortier M.A., Rahmani A.M., Sharifiheris H., Bender M., “Feasibility of continuous smart health monitoring in pregnant population: A mixed-method approach” (opens in new tab), Plos Digital Health, vol. 3, 2024.
- Yang Z., Khatibi E., Nagesh N., Abbasian M., Azimi I., Jain R., Rahmani A.M., “ChatDiet: Empowering personalized nutrition-oriented food recommender chatbots through an LLM-augmented framework” (opens in new tab), Smart Health, vol. 32, 2024.
- Yang Z., Wang Y., Yamashita K.S., Khatibi E., Azimi I., Dutt N., Borelli J.L., Rahmani A.M., “Integrating wearable sensor data and self-reported diaries for personalized affect forecasting” (opens in new tab), Smart Health, vol. 32, 2024.
- Jafarlou S., Azimi I., Lai J., Wang Y., Labbaf S., Nguyen B., Qureshi H., Marcotullio C., Borelli J.L., Dutt N.D., Rahmani A.M., “Objective monitoring of loneliness levels using smart devices: A multi-device approach for mental health applications” (opens in new tab), Plos One, vol. 19, 2024.
Most Cited Publications
- Rahmani A.M., Gia T.N., Negash B., Anzanpour A., Azimi I., Jiang M., Liljeberg P., “Exploiting smart e-Health gateways at the edge of healthcare Internet-of-Things: A fog computing approach” (opens in new tab), Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 78, pp. 641-658, 2018.
- Rahmani A.-M., Thanigaivelan N.K., Gia T.N., Granados J., Negash B., Liljeberg P., Tenhunen H., “Smart e-Health Gateway: Bringing intelligence to Internet-of-Things based ubiquitous healthcare systems” (opens in new tab), 2015 12th Annual IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference Ccnc 2015, pp. 826-834, 2015.
- Firouzi F., Rahmani A.M., Mankodiya K., Badaroglu M., Merrett G.V., Wong P., Farahani B., “Internet-of-Things and big data for smarter healthcare: From device to architecture, applications and analytics” (opens in new tab), Future Generation Computer Systems, vol. 78, pp. 583-586, 2018.
- Yang G., Pang Z., Jamal Deen M., Mianxiong D., Zhang Y.-T., Lovell N., Rahmani A.M., “Homecare Robotic Systems for Healthcare 4.0: Visions and Enabling Technologies” (opens in new tab), IEEE Journal of Biomedical and Health Informatics, vol. 24, pp. 2535-2549, 2020.
- Azimi I., Rahmani A.M., Liljeberg P., Tenhunen H., “Internet of things for remote elderly monitoring: a study from user-centered perspective” (opens in new tab), Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, vol. 8, pp. 273-289, 2017.
- Mehrabadi M.A., Azimi I., Sarhaddi F., Axelin A., Niela-Vilen H., Myllyntausta S., Stenholm S., Dutt N., Liljeberg P., Rahmani A.M., “Sleep tracking of a commercially available smart ring and smartwatch against medical-grade actigraphy in everyday settings: Instrument validation study” (opens in new tab), Jmir Mhealth and Uhealth, vol. 8, 2020.
- Cao R., Azimi I., Sarhaddi F., Niela-Vilen H., Axelin A., Liljeberg P., Rahmani A.M., “Accuracy Assessment of Oura Ring Nocturnal Heart Rate and Heart Rate Variability in Comparison With Electrocardiography in Time and Frequency Domains: Comprehensive Analysis” (opens in new tab), Journal of Medical Internet Research, vol. 24, 2022.
- Rahmani A.M., Liljeberg P., Preden J.-S., Jantsch A., “Fog computing in the Internet of Things: Intelligence at the edge” (opens in new tab), Fog Computing in the Internet of Things Intelligence at the Edge, pp. 1-172, 2017.
- Lotfi-Kamran P., Rahmani A.M., Daneshtalab M., Afzali-Kusha A., Navabi Z., “EDXY-A low cost congestion-aware routing algorithm for network-on-chips” (opens in new tab), Journal of Systems Architecture, vol. 56, pp. 256-264, 2010.
- Gia T.N., Rahmani A.-M., Westerlund T., Liljeberg P., Tenhunen H., “Fault tolerant and scalable IoT-based architecture for health monitoring” (opens in new tab), Sas 2015 2015 IEEE Sensors Applications Symposium Proceedings, 2015.
Contact Information
Website: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~amirr1/
Email: amirr1@uci.edu
Phone: (949) 824-7894
Address: 4010 Nursing & Health Sciences Hall, Irvine, CA 92697-3959
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Last updated on 2/19/2026.