Luigi Andrea Moretti

Project Ownership:

• Research design: Defined research questions, methodology, participant protocols
• Ethics & compliance: Prepared and secured ethics approval for multi-device human subjects research
• Startup coordination: Managing partnership between two hardware startups + university requirements
• Data strategy: Designing collection, analysis, and validation frameworks

Research & Supervision:

• Affective computing algorithm implementation for real-world wearable deployments
• Co-supervised 2 MSc students on affective computing projects (1 resulting in accepted book chapter)
• Collaborated with Dr Zahraa Abdallah on multimodal emotion recognition approaches

Product Development:

• Defined clinical problem: 1 in 10 UK adults have anxiety disorders, yet remain under-diagnosed due to reliance on self-report questionnaires and clinic snapshots
• Technical implementation: Multimodal sensing (heart rate and movement in the daily-use prototype; electrodermal activity and skin temperature in lab studies) with contextual data capture via mobile app
• User research: Led 7-phase co-design process with 10–25 participants per phase (patients, unpaid carers, clinicians) to validate features and ensure interpretability
• Prototyping: Building functional Android app, Wear OS Face, and clinician dashboard, iterating based on user feedback across 6 completed phases

Impact & Validation:

• Published "Affective Computing in Anxiety Disorders: Rapid Literature Review" at HEALTHINF 2025
• Won the Dermot O’Reilly Memorial Prize for the most innovative research and engaging presentation by an early career researcher, MQ and DATAMIND Spotlight Session, MHP Research Summit 2026
• Won Best Student Poster Award at Multimodal AI Workshop (University of Sheffield / Alan Turing Institute)
• Secured £10,500+ in competitive funding (NHS Bristol, North Somerset & South Gloucestershire ICB; UWE Bristol CATE grants)
• Designed for clinical pathway integration with ethical approvals
• Featured member: Experimental Psychology Society (EPS), Innovate Healthier Together Fellowship (NHS BNSSG)

Clinical Insights for Digital Health Product Development:

• Patient communication under uncertainty: Learned that addressing vaccine hesitancy requires empathetic scientific communication, not authoritative directives. Same principle applies to explaining wearable health data to anxious patients
• High-throughput care challenges: Experienced why digital tools fail when they add friction; every extra tap or screen matters when serving 80+ people daily
• Trust > Features: Technology adoption in healthcare depends on human connection and sense of trust first, technical capabilities second

0→1 Product Development:

• Conceived and prototyped affective computing (emotion detection) feature to increase user engagement in cardiac monitoring device
• Prepared technical documentation about product unique value proposition and specifications
• Implemented real-time ECG signal processing algorithms for emotion state classification
• Coordinated UI design efforts to enhance user experience

Go-to-Market:

• Pitched to VCs and healthcare accelerators across Europe, US, and Asia
• Secured letter of intent from Medical University of Lodz (Poland) for clinical trials
• Negotiated partnership discussions with Asian wearable device manufacturer for hardware integration
• Achieved top 10 placement in ADB/Agorize "COVID-19 Vaccine Safety Monitoring" competition
• Semi-finalist at Webit 2021 conference

Contributions:

• Translated clinical requirements into technical specifications
• Realised 3D medical models and segmentations with novel techniques
• Validated feasibility of proposed 3D segmentation approaches for surgical planning
• Coordinated the work with a startup in charge of 3D printing the models

Entrepreneurial Foundations:

• Secured €30,000 EU grant (PIN - Pugliesi Innovativi, Apulia Region)
• Market validation: Sold out bootstrapped MVPs within 6 months
• Project leadership: Coordinated design, production, marketing, business planning
• Offered to make the project open-source (2020), donating proceeds to NGO