Hee Jeong Han

Ph.D Candidate in Informatics

News      Research Experience      Publications      Education      Projects      Contact       CV

About Me

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth, where I advance research at the intersection of health, technology, and artificial intelligence. My work focuses on creating innovative digital solutions to promote mental health and well-being.

I earned my Ph.D. in Informatics from the College of Informatics Science and Technology at Penn State University. I worked with Dr. Saeed Abdullah at the Well-being and Health Innovation Lab.

During my Ph.D., my research focuses on designing, developing, and deploying conversational agents that promote health and well-being, particularly by delivering therapeutic content and supporting self-management for mental health. I also lead a project developing a deep learning-based model to assess the context of symptoms (e.g., PTSD, dementia). Additionally, I am developing user-centric, privacy-preserving financial technologies that leverage open banking data to identify problematic financial behaviors, and to provide personalized interventions to reduce risk of harm for individuals with mental illnesses. Another key project I lead explores how care partners support financial management for individuals with bipolar disorder, aiming to understand their challenges and how technology can help address these issues.

Before I joined Penn State, I graduated with a B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering from Ewha Womans University and an M.S. in Computer Science from the University of California, Irvine. For my Master's thesis, I proposed a new system to predict stress levels in everyday settings sensing on wearable devices.

News

Aug 2025   I joined the the Center for Technology and Behavioral Health at Dartmouth as a Postdoctoral Fellow!

Aug 2025   I officially earned my Ph.D. in Informatics!

Jun 2025   I successfully defended my dissertation!

Apr 2025   Our paper on on collaborative FinTech for supporting the financial lives of people with bipolar disorder has been accepted in CHI 2025 Workshop on the Future of Money and HCI

Oct 2024   I have been selected to attend the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (GHC).

Oct 2024   Our paper on assessing the feasibility and acceptance of a conversational agents for self-management of PTSD has been accepted in SAGE Digital Health

May 2023   Our paper on evaluating a conversational agents for self-management of PTSD with clinical experts has been accepted in JMIR Foramtive Health

Dec 2022   I passed comprehensive exam!

Dec 2022   I presented our work on diagnosing dementia using text and speech data at the ICDS Symposium.

Nov 2022   Our paper on developing a model to classify dementia using text and speech data has been accepted in Multimodal AI in Healthcare.

Mar 2022   We won the W3PHIAI-22 Data Hackallenge (Hackathon/Challenge) by developing a model to classify dementia using text and speech data. I presented this work at the the 2022 AAAI Workshop on Health Intelligence.

Sep 2021   I served as a student volunteer at Ubicomp/ISWC 2021.

Aug 2021   Our paper on designing a conversational agents to support individuals with PTSD has been accepted in the UbiComp/ISWC Adjunct Proceedings.

Aug 2021   I attened the 2021 CRA-WP Grad Cohort for Women.

Aug 2020   I started my Ph.D journey at College of Informatics Science and Technology at Penn State University advised by Dr. Saeed Abdullah.

Education

Pennsylvania State University

Doctor of Philosophy in Informatics
Aug. 2020 - Aug. 2025

  • Advisor: Saeed Abdullah
  • Dissertation title: Designing Digital Health Technologies for Serious Mental Illnesses: Enabling Self-Management and Collaborative Care
    • PDF

University of California, Irvine

Master of Science in Computer Science
Sep. 2017 - Jun. 2019

  • Advisor: Nikil Dutt
  • Thesis title: Objective Stress Monitoring based on Wearable Sensors in Everyday Settings

Ewha Womans University

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering
Mar. 2012 - Feb. 2017

  • Advisor: Dong Sub Cho
  • ABEEK (Accreditation Board for Engineering Education of Korea)

Publications

Designing Collaborative Fintech: Identifying Care Partner Goals and Challenges for Supporting the Financial Lives of Those with Bipolar Disorder

Hee Jeong Han, Johnna Blair, Jeff Brozena, Dahlia Mukherjee, Erika F. H. Saunders, and Saeed Abdullah
in CHI 2025 Workshop on the Future of Money and HCI

The Currency of Mood: The Use of Open Banking APIs to Better Understand Spending and Bipolar Disorder

Jeff Brozena, Johnna Blair,Hee Jeong Han, Manar Hesino, Dahlia Mukherjee, Erika F. H. Saunders, and Saeed Abdullah
in CHI 2025 Workshop on the Future of Money and HCI

Assessing Acceptance and Feasibility of a Conversational Agent to Support Individuals Living with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder

Hee Jeong Han, Sanjana Mendu, Beth K Jaworski, Jason E Owen, and Saeed Abdullah
in Digital Health, 10
PDF

Preliminary Evaluation of a Conversational Agent to Support Self-management of Individuals Living with PTSD: An Interview Study with Clinical Experts

Hee Jeong Han, Sanjana Mendu, Beth K Jaworski, Jason E Owen, and Saeed Abdullah
in JMIR Formative Research, 7, e45894 2023
PDF

Automatic Classification of Dementia using Text and Speech data

Hee Jeong Han, Suhas BN, Ling Qiu, and Saeed Abdullah
in Multimodal AI in Healthcare, pp. 399-407. Springer, Cham 2023
PDF

PTSDialogue: Designing a Conversational Agent to Support Individuals with Post- Traumatic Stress Disorder

Hee Jeong Han, Sanjana Mendu, Beth K Jaworski, Jason E Owen, and Saeed Abdullah
in Adjunct Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing and Proceedings of the 2021 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computers (UbiComp '21) 2021
PDF

Objective stress monitoring based on wearable sensors in everyday settings

Hee Jeong Han, Sina Labbaf, Jessica L. Borelli, Nikil Dutt, and Amir M. Rahmani
in Journal of Medical Engineering \& Technology 44, no. 4: 177-189, 2020
PDF

Pedestrian Management System for Real-time Pedestrian Detection

Hee Jeong Han, Miso Kwon, You Hyun Kang, Dong Sub Cho
in Proceedings of Korea Multimedia Society Conference of the Spring, 2016

  • Best Paper Award
PDF

Pedestrian Pattern Classification For the Pedestrian Counting Systems using Key Matrix

Hee Jeong Han, You Hyun Kang, Miso Kwon, Dong Sub Cho
in Proceedings of Korea Computer Congress, 2016

  • Best Paper Award
PDF

Pedestrian Safety Management Systems based on Multiple-input enabled F-pad

Hee Jeong Han, You Hyun Kang, Miso Kwon, Dong Sub Cho
in Proceedings of The Korean Institute of Electrical Engineers(KIEE) Summer Conference, 2016
PDF

Analysis of Pedestrian Pattern for Pedestrian Counting Systems

You Hyun Kang, Miso Kwon, Hee Jeong Han, Dong Sub Cho
in Proceedings of The 2016 Spring Conference of the Korea Information Processing Society (KIPS), 2016
PDF

Adaptive for time-varing clustering DBSCAN

Miso Kwon, You Hyun Kang, Hee Jeong Han, Dong Sub Cho
in Proceedings of 2016 Information and Control Symposium, 2016

Research Experience

Dartmouth CTBH

Dartmouth Center for Technology and Behavioral Health

Department of Biomedical Data, Geisel School of Medicine, Dartmouth College
Aug. 2025 - Present

Postdoctoral Fellow

Penn State University

Wellbeing & Health Innovation (WHI) Lab

College of Informatics Science and Technology, Pennsylvania State University
Aug. 2020 - Aug. 2025

Graduate Research Assistant

  • Fintech to support persons with bipolar disorder
    • Develop user-centric, privacy-preserving financial technologies that leverage open banking data to identify problematic financial behaviors and provide personalized interventions to reduce the risk of harm for individuals with mental illnesses.
    • Understand how care partners currently support financial management, identify their challenges, and explore how technology can help address these issues.
  • PTSDialogue - A conversational agent to sustain patient engagement in PTSD
    • Developed a conversational agent that can deliver therapeutic content and provide supportive accountability in PTSD and assessed feasibility and acceptability of the developed conversational agent for sustaining engagement with people living with PTSD.
  • ACOUSTIC - Automatic classification of subjects with dementia and healthy controls using text and speech data
    • Built a deep learning-based model to classify dementia from text and speech data.
University of California, Irvine

Dutt Research Group

Department of Computer Science, University of California, Irvine
Jun. 2018 - Jul. 2019

Graduate Research Assistant

  • Healthcare IoT - Ubiquitous Stress Monitoring using Shimmer’s Device
    • Proposed a new stress monitoring system. Its algorithm, using PPG, ECG and GSR sensors on wearable device, predicts stress level in everyday settings.
Ewha Womans University

Computer Architecture and System Design Laboratory

Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Ewha Womans University
Aug. 2015 - Jun. 2016

Undergraduate Research Assistant

  • Multimodal Pedestrian Counting System using Key-Matrix pad and Sonic-Bar
    • Proposed new pedestrian counting system. It contains two algorithms, Adaptive-DBSCAN and Pedestrian Algorithm. and two new hardwares, F-pad and Sonic-Bar.

Projects

Fintech to support persons with bipolar disorder

May. 2024 - Present

Develops user-centric, privacy-preserving financial technologies that leverage open banking data to identify problematic financial behaviors, and to provide personalized interventions to reduce risk of harm for individuals with mental illnesses.

PTSDialogue - A conversational agent to sustain patient engagement in PTSD

Aug. 2020 - 2024

Developed a conversational agent that can deliver therapeutic content and provide supportive accountability in PTSD and assessed feasibility and acceptability of the developed conversational agent for sustaining engagement with patients with PTSD.

Detecting Mental Health Symptoms From Text Data Enhanced by ChatGPT

Jan. 2023 - Present

Built a deep learning-based model to assess mental health symptoms from text data. The model achieved 90.4% accuracy. Also, the model will be enhanced by labels generated by ChatGPT after evaluating the accuracy of the annotations.

Automatic Classification of Dementia using Text and Speech data

Feb. 2022 - Mar. 2022

Built an ensemble model with two deep learning-based architectures for text and speech analysis. The model achieved 89.8% accuracy when classifying individuals with dementia and health controls.

WiSDoM: Guiding Internet Users Toward Safer PrivacyDecisions

Jan. 2021 - Jun. 2021

Built a Chrome extension tool that informs users about their disclosing behaviors. It is powered by a BERT-based objective disclose detection model.

PDF

Healthcare IoT - Ubiquitous Stress Monitoring using Shimmer's Device

Jun. 2018 - Jul. 2019

Proposed a new stress monitoring system. Its algorithm, using PPG, ECG and GSR sensors on wearable device, predicts stress level in everyday settings.

Contact