Our Doctoral Researcher, Patrick Langer, just returned from his research stay at Stanford University with the Biodesign Digital Health group, and shared his reflections on his time in Silicon Valley:

Greetings from Stanford!
Over the past few months, I had the opportunity to work with the brilliant team at Stanford Biodesign Digital Health, whose research aligns closely with our work at the Centre for Digital Health Interventions. We share a common vision: bringing cutting-edge machine learning research into real-world healthcare and digital biomarker applications.

While many ML models are published about in papers, few are tested in clinical environments—and even fewer are practically usable. To bridge this gap, we joined forces on the ETH CLAID and Stanford Spezi open-source platforms, focusing on building robust, interoperable, and reusable ML components. These tools are designed to integrate seamlessly into clinical workflows and digital health studies, making them viable for real-world evaluation and deployment.

During my stay, I also focused on developing novel multimodal Large Language Model (LLM) architectures to integrate electronic health records (EHRs) with time-series data from wearables. These models leverage cross-attention mechanisms to generate joint embeddings across modalities, enabling deeper understanding and reasoning over both text and physiological data. We are working on a publication on this new foundational work and look forward to sharing it very soon.

Beyond research, the time at Stanford was an incredible opportunity to connect with fascinating people across academia, healthcare, industry, and the startup ecosystem. I had the chance to attend inspiring talks, exchange ideas, eating lunch with directors of Meta at LlamaCon and attending YC AI startup school.

I’m deeply grateful to my hosts, Paul Schmiedmayer and Oliver Aalami, and the entire Biodesign Digital Health team for their warm welcome, and inspiring collaboration. A special thank you to Prof. Elgar Fleisch, for making this stay possible and supporting this ongoing collaboration.

This has been an enriching experience, providing new perspectives and momentum for our research at both centers. I am grateful to remain part of the Stanford Biodesign Digital Health team and look forward to fostering even closer connections between our labs!

– Patrick Langer