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Research Portfolio

Rahul Ranjan

Incoming PhD Student | Edge AI & Mobile Health

Robust Biomedical Signal Processing on Mobile Devices

Monash University

Focus

Edge AI + Mobile Health

On-device clinical vitals

Funding

2 Competitive Scholarships

Fully funded PhD

Publications

2 Peer-Reviewed

Springer Nature + IEEE

Portrait of Rahul Ranjan

Research Snapshot

Edge AI + Mobile Health

Clinical-grade, on-device vitals

  • Contactless vitals from smartphone camera (no wearables)
  • Robust to motion artifacts & poor lighting
  • Edge-optimized models (real-time inference)
  • Clinically validated (AAMI/BHS standards)

About

About & Contact

I build clinical-grade AI that runs on smartphones, not server farms.

My PhD research solves the hardest problem in mobile health: extracting accurate vital signs (HR, SpO₂, BP) from noisy video in the wild—motion artifacts, poor lighting, diverse skin tones.

I combine deep signal reconstruction (encoder–decoder models like U-Nets/autoencoders) with edge-first deployment (distillation + quantization) to deliver real-time inference on mobile NPUs via CoreML/ONNX—putting reliable vital-sign monitoring in your pocket.

Contactless vitals from smartphone camera (no wearables)Robust to motion artifacts & poor lightingEdge-optimized models (real-time inference)Clinically validated (AAMI/BHS standards)

Recent Updates

  • March 2026 Starting PhD in Electrical & Computer Systems Engineering at Monash University (16 March 2026).
  • December 2025 Completed Master of Artificial Intelligence at Monash University.
  • November 2025 VITAL Net paper accepted at IEEE Applied Sensing Conference 2026.
  • May 2025 Published journal paper on blood pressure estimation in Journal of Medical Systems.

Technical Skills

Programming Languages

PythonC++MATLABRJava

ML/Deep Learning

PyTorchTensorFlowScikit-learnKerasXGBoost

Computer Vision & Signal

OpenCVrPPGSelf-AttentionSpectral FilteringAnomaly Detection

Data & Visualization

NumPyPandasMatplotlibSeabornPlotly

Edge AI & Mobile

CoreMLONNXTensorFlow LiteModel QuantizationSwift

Tools & Infrastructure

PostgreSQLDockerGitLaTeX

Education

  • PhD, Electrical & Computer Systems Engineering (ECSE)

    Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (2026–2029)

  • Master of Artificial Intelligence

    Monash University, Melbourne, Australia (2023–2025)

  • M.Sc. (Hons.) Physics; B.E. (Hons.) Electronics & Instrumentation

    Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS), Pilani, India (2017–2022) — Monte Carlo Simulations of Phase Transitions in Ising Models

Awards & Funding

  • Monash Research Scholarship

    Electrical and Computer Systems Engineering — Fully funded PhD (2026–2029)

  • Faculty of Engineering International Postgraduate Research Scholarship

    FEIPRS — Competitive international award (2026–2029)

  • The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award

    Silver (2015)

Collaboration

Looking for

  • Clinical and translational partnerships for mobile vital sign validation
  • Industry collaborations for on-device deployment and productization
  • Cross-disciplinary research on robust biomedical signal processing

What I bring

  • End-to-end rPPG/PPG pipelines (data → model → evaluation)
  • Clinical-grade evaluation aligned to AAMI/BHS standards
  • Edge-optimized deployment on mobile NPUs (CoreML/ONNX)

Open to collaborations and grant partnerships in 2026.

Funding-ready Profile

Outcomes

  • 95%+ HR accuracy on mobile rPPG in real-world conditions
  • <5 mmHg BP MAE aligned with AAMI/BHS criteria
  • Reproducible evaluation scripts and deployment-ready checkpoints

Capabilities

  • Robust signal processing + deep learning fusion
  • Edge inference optimization (quantization, distillation)
  • Clinical validation pipeline and reporting

Research

Research & Publications

Selected Publications

Evolving Blood Pressure Estimation: From Feature Analysis to Image-Based Deep Learning Models

Roha, V. S., Ranjan, R., & Yuce, M. R.

Journal of Medical Systems, Springer Nature, 49(1), 97 (2025)

Introduces IMCA-PPG, an image-based multimodal framework that converts single-site PPG into PPG/vPPG/aPPG visual streams, extracts embeddings with ResNet-50, and fuses them with multi-head cross-attention for cuffless BP estimation.

Why this matters: Reliable cuffless BP estimation from one sensor makes continuous cardiovascular monitoring more practical for mobile and remote care.

View Paper DOI

VITAL Net: A Hybrid Framework for SpO₂ and HR Estimation Using Smartphone rPPG Video

Ranjan, R., Roha, V. S., & Yuce, M. R.

IEEE Applied Sensing Conference (2026)

Presents a unified smartphone-video pipeline for contactless SpO₂ and HR estimation by combining physiology-aware Ratio-of-Ratios features with hybrid ensemble and CNN modeling.

Why this matters: Turns a standard smartphone camera into a low-cost vital-sign monitor for settings where wearables or clinical devices are not always available.

Available upon request

Research Interests

  • Contactless vital sign monitoring from smartphone cameras (rPPG)
  • Robust signal processing for noisy, real-world physiological data
  • Edge AI: efficient deep learning on mobile devices with limited compute
  • Clinical validation: meeting AAMI/BHS standards for medical-grade accuracy

Projects

Research Projects

Vital Sign Monitoring (Mobile)

P1

Computer Vision · PyTorch · ResNet + Attention

Converted single-sensor PPG into visual representations (PPG, vPPG, aPPG) and trained ResNet-50 with multi-head attention to estimate HR/BP on-device; aligned outputs to clinical AAMI/BHS standards.

Predictive Maintenance for Rail

P2

XGBoost · Time-series features · SQL

Engineered rolling/lag features and deployed XGBoost models with drift checks and retraining cadence; reduced unplanned downtime 18–22% and delivered 48-hour lead time on failures.

Data Flow Synchronicity Checker

P3

Python · Hashing · Automation

Automated file integrity checks across multi-repo FPGA verification flows using SHA-256, manifest diffs, and cron-based scheduling; shipped email digests for mismatches to keep teams in sync.

Experience

Research & Professional Experience

2021–2022

Master's Thesis (Computational Physics)

Department of Physics, BITS Pilani

  • Investigated phase transitions in ferromagnetic materials using Monte Carlo simulations (Metropolis algorithm) on 2D/3D Ising lattice models with periodic boundary conditions.
  • Calculated thermodynamic observables (energy, magnetization, susceptibility, specific heat) across temperature sweeps; achieved 40% runtime reduction via vectorization.
  • Extracted critical exponents (β, γ) using finite-size scaling and power-law fitting; analyzed impact of disorder on transition sharpness.
Jun 2022–Feb 2023

Information Technology Officer

Aglow Engineers, Kolkata

  • Established the company's first centralized data infrastructure by migrating manual entry systems to SQL, creating a robust, queryable database for all operational logs.
  • Accelerated stakeholder decision-making by developing Python Automation scripts that reduced technical interpretation time through automatically emailed plain-English summaries.
  • Reduced system downtime by 22% and achieved 89% prediction accuracy in vulnerability detection by building proactive forecasting models using Random Forest & LSTM.
Jan 2022–May 2022

Software Intern

Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS), New Delhi

  • Predicted asset failures 48 hours in advance with 94% accuracy by implementing Anomaly Detection within WISE modules using Python and XGBoost.
  • Reduced workshop downtime by 18% by deploying Predictive Maintenance models across 200+ railway assets.
Aug 2021–Dec 2021

Software Development Intern

Xilinx (now AMD), Hyderabad — Timing Team, Device Capture Group

  • Streamlined file-hash verification for 25+ design engineers by developing and deploying the "Data Flow Synchronicity Checker" tool across FPGA teams.
  • Improved team workflow efficiency by 30% by building production infrastructure with nightly automated checks (1000+ file validations/day) using cron-scheduled Bash jobs.