Ruchik Mishra

I am a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology, working with Prof. Omer T. Inan in the Inan Research Lab.

I currently develop a translational pipeline for wearable joint acoustics, aimed at bringing joint-health assessment from the clinic into the home. My work focuses on children with juvenile idiopathic arthritis (JIA), where I use the sounds a knee makes as it moves, recorded by a wearable device, to predict disease activity. The goal is objective, at-home monitoring that can capture changes in joint health between clinic visits.

More broadly, my research aims to make health data collected outside the clinic reliable enough to act on. I combine multimodal wearable sensing and machine learning to turn physiological signals into interpretable information about a person’s changing health, accounting for factors such as sensor placement and differences in anatomy that can mask true changes.

I received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louisville in 2025, advised by Dr. Dan O. Popa and Dr. Karla Conn Welch. My dissertation developed multimodal emotion recognition for human–robot interaction across neurodiverse populations, including children with autism. I earned my B.E. (Honors) in Manufacturing Engineering from BITS Pilani, Hyderabad.

news

Jul 29, 2026	Our paper validating the KneeMS wearable against a benchtop system in children with JIA was accepted to the IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine.
Jul 01, 2026	Our paper on predicting JIA disease activity with KneeMS and machine learning was accepted to IEEE EMBC 2026.
Mar 25, 2026	Gave an invited talk, “Joint-Associated Mechanical Sounds,” to the Division of Pediatric Rheumatology at Emory University School of Medicine.
Mar 20, 2026	Presented a poster on KneeMS for juvenile idiopathic arthritis at the 2026 Pediatric Rheumatology Symposium in Minneapolis, MN.
Jun 09, 2025	Joined the Inan Research Lab at Georgia Tech as a postdoctoral fellow.
May 28, 2025	Our paper comparing printed and verbal assembly instructions delivered by a social robot was accepted to IEEE CASE 2025.
May 09, 2025	Received my Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Louisville.
Mar 17, 2025	My paper on personalized speech emotion recognition with vision transformers was accepted to IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.
Nov 04, 2024	Awarded the Dissertation Completion Award, a University of Louisville fellowship for Spring 2025.
Oct 07, 2024	Our paper on wearable measures of children’s listening effort was published in the American Journal of Audiology.
Feb 02, 2024	Received a Mark of Distinction at the Kentucky NSF EPSCoR SuperCollider research poster session.
Sep 10, 2023	Presented our paper on social impressions of the NAO robot and its effect on physiology at ACII 2023, MIT Media Lab.
Jun 14, 2023	Guest on the Talking Robotics podcast, talking about personalized robotic intervention for children with autism (YouTube, Spotify).
Apr 06, 2023	Our poster was accepted to the Socially Acceptable Robots workshop at ICRA 2023 in London.

selected publications

JTEHM

KneeMS to Monitor Knee Acoustic Emissions for Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis

Ruchik Mishra, Quentin Goossens, Christopher Nichols, Ahmet Rasim Emirdagi, Chuoqi Chen, Onur Selim Kilic, Mohammad Nikbakht, Prabhkirat Bindra, Catherine Yang, Cate Garretson, Lori Ponder, Sampath Prahalad, and Omer T. Inan

IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine, 2026

TL;DR DOI Bib HTML

@article{mishra2026kneems,
  title = {KneeMS to Monitor Knee Acoustic Emissions for Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis},
  author = {Mishra, Ruchik and Goossens, Quentin and Nichols, Christopher and Emirdagi, Ahmet Rasim and Chen, Chuoqi and Kilic, Onur Selim and Nikbakht, Mohammad and Bindra, Prabhkirat and Yang, Catherine and Garretson, Cate and Ponder, Lori and Prahalad, Sampath and Inan, Omer T.},
  journal = {IEEE Journal of Translational Engineering in Health and Medicine},
  volume = {14},
  year = {2026},
  doi = {10.1109/JTEHM.2026.3721498},
}

RA-L

Personalized Speech Emotion Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction Using Vision Transformers

Ruchik Mishra, Andrew Frye, Madan Mohan Rayguru, and Dan O. Popa

IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2025

TL;DR DOI arXiv Bib HTML

@article{mishra2025speech,
  title = {Personalized Speech Emotion Recognition in Human-Robot Interaction Using Vision Transformers},
  author = {Mishra, Ruchik and Frye, Andrew and Rayguru, Madan Mohan and Popa, Dan O.},
  journal = {IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  volume = {10},
  number = {5},
  pages = {4890--4897},
  year = {2025},
  doi = {10.1109/LRA.2025.3554949},
}

arXiv

Human-Mediated Large Language Models for Robotic Intervention in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders

Ruchik Mishra, Karla Conn Welch, and Dan O. Popa

Under review; preprint available on arXiv (arXiv:2402.00260), 2024

TL;DR arXiv Bib

@article{mishra2024llm,
  title = {Human-Mediated Large Language Models for Robotic Intervention in Children with Autism Spectrum Disorders},
  author = {Mishra, Ruchik and Welch, Karla Conn and Popa, Dan O.},
  journal = {Under review; preprint available on arXiv (arXiv:2402.00260)},
  year = {2024},
}

EMBC

Predicting Disease Activity in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Using KneeMS and Machine Learning

Ruchik Mishra, Ahmet Rasim Emirdagi, Chuoqi Chen, Catherine Yang, Holland E. Ernst, Lori Ponder, Sampath Prahalad, and Omer T. Inan

In 48th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), in press, 2026

TL;DR Bib

@inproceedings{mishra2026embc,
  title = {Predicting Disease Activity in Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis Using KneeMS and Machine Learning},
  author = {Mishra, Ruchik and Emirdagi, Ahmet Rasim and Chen, Chuoqi and Yang, Catherine and Ernst, Holland E. and Ponder, Lori and Prahalad, Sampath and Inan, Omer T.},
  booktitle = {48th Annual International Conference of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society (EMBC), in press},
  year = {2026},
}