Greetings from Taiwan to Zürich · SDS 2026

Hello, data scientists.
Let's talk about classrooms.

Uedu is an open educational research platform built at National Central University (Taiwan). We bring AI tutors, learning analytics, and physiological signals together — and we're at SDS 2026 looking for collaborators in the international data science community.

Our paper at SDS 2026

A person-centered look at HRV in real classrooms.

Wrist-worn HRV is enticing for educational researchers — non-invasive, continuous, deployable. But what does it actually measure once a real lecture, a real programming task, and six real undergraduates are in the room? We report a feasibility study with honest limits and one methodological warning we think every learning-analytics team should hear.

IEEE SDS 2026 · Zürich

From Wearables to Classrooms: A Person-Centered Feasibility Study of HRV-Based Physiological Monitoring for Learning Analytics

Chia-Kai Chang, Kuei-Hao Li, Cheng-Lin Cheng, Ting-Chuan Lin · National Central University & National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan

We assess whether Garmin vívoactive 5 watches — paired with the real-time Garmin Health Companion SDK (not the summary-only Garmin Health API) — yield consistent HRV during authentic Python programming classes (six undergraduates, two 3-hour sessions). Per-student ICC(3,1) between sign-aligned, z-scored HRV and Garmin's stress index was moderate-to-good (RMSSD .48–.74; pNN50 .64–.85; lnHF .54–.70). Group-level pooling of raw HRV produced strong but spurious event effects that vanished after person-centering — a Simpson-paradoxical pattern that should change how this community pools data. As a hypothesis-generating finding, smaller LF/HF increases during programming tracked larger midterm gains (ρ = −1.0, n = 4, descriptive). The honest message: a wearable is a measurement instrument, not a stress oracle, and person-centered analysis is a methodological prerequisite, not a stylistic choice.

Platform overview

A research-grade educational platform, openly built.

Uedu is not a product. It is the live infrastructure for a research lab — running in production across multiple universities, instrumented end-to-end, and designed so that every interaction becomes a data point that students, teachers, and researchers can trust.

Uedu Core

AI teaching assistants, classroom GPTs, quizzes, surveys, course management — running in live university classrooms across multiple campuses.

Uedu Fit

Garmin Connect integration with HRV, sleep, stress, and synchronized multi-person beat-to-beat interval streaming.

Uedu Mind

PALM — physiologically-aware language models that adapt tutoring to the learner's measured state.

Uedu Sense

IoT environmental sensing: light, temperature, humidity, noise, CO₂ — the room as a co-author of learning.

Uedu Brain

In-house wearable combining EEG, fNIRS, and PPG. Built for translational neuro-educational research.

Uedu Lab

The trusted educational data lake — researcher-facing exports, IRB-aligned access, reproducible cohorts.

Theoretical framework

Educational Omics — six axes of evidence.

We borrow the ‘omics’ vocabulary from the life sciences to argue that learning, like a living system, is only legible when you can read multiple modalities at once. Educational Omics is the framework that organises Uedu's data; it is also our case for why ed-tech needs a layered, hypothesis-aware research substrate, not just dashboards.

Cognomics

Cognitive trajectories — LLM dialogue, Bloom's taxonomy, reasoning traces.

Linguomics

Language complexity, semantic shift, prosody, automatic speech recognition.

PhysioNeuromics

HRV, sleep, stress, EEG, fNIRS — the body's running commentary on learning.

Sociomics

Forum interaction, collaborative writing, peer review, community formation.

Environomics

Light, temperature, noise, CO₂ — the room as a quiet co-author of attention.

Ethicomics

Consent, privacy, AI bias auditing, equitable access — first-class data, not a footnote.

Platform at a glance

A research substrate, not a marketing site.

Uedu is built and operated by an academic research group; every layer is documented, IRB-aligned, and designed to be cited in a paper rather than to win a pitch deck.

7
Subsystems integrated
6
Educational Omics axes
24
AI tutor function tools
IRB
NTU-REC 202507EM058

Recent venues where Uedu research has appeared or will appear:

ACM L@S 2026 — Seoul IEEE EMBC 2026 — Toronto IEEE SDS 2026 — Zürich IEEE ICALT 2024–26 AIED 2026 EDM 2026 ICMET 2025–26 IEEE BigDataService 2025 IEEE ETOP 2025
Let's collaborate

Three concrete ways to work with us.

Whether you're an academic, a data engineer, or a startup pushing AI into education — Uedu is open to thoughtful collaboration. We especially welcome partners across Asia–Pacific, Europe, and the international LAK / EDM / AIED communities.

01

Co-author research

Multimodal classroom data, federated fairness across institutions, physiological learning analytics, cross-cultural validation. We're actively recruiting partners for Apple Health × Garmin federated studies and for our group-level BBI synchrony work.

Email Chia-Kai
02

Use the Public API

Uedu exposes a clean RESTful API at uedu.tw/api/v1 and a Model Context Protocol server for LLM-native tooling. Free for academic research. Six tools cover universities, public courses, course statistics, papers, and conferences — built so MCP-enabled agents can reason over our published metadata.

Open developer docs
03

Multi-person Garmin BBI

Synchronized beat-to-beat interval streaming across an entire classroom, raw sequences preserved, group-level aggregation views available. Looking for collaborators in affective computing, physiological synchrony, and group flow research — and for partners who'd like to instrument their own cohorts.

Discuss with us

See you in Zürich.

If any of this resonates, please find us at SDS 2026 — or reach out before the conference closes.

Chia-Kai Chang, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor · Center for General Education
National Central University, Taiwan