IEEE CASS Workshop on Digital Group Therapy
Date: October 19, 2025
Venue: Khalifa University, Abu Dhabi, UAE
Organizers: Ibrahim (Abe) M. Elfadel and Herbert Jelinek, Khalifa University, UAE
Goal:
This BioCAS2025 satellite workshop is designed to provide BioCAS2025 participants with an integrated perspective on the theory, instrumentation, and analytical methods that underpin the emerging field of Digital Group Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. The workshop is based on the recognition that group dynamics, which play a crucial role in therapeutic outcomes, can be characterized through multimodal physiological recordings and psychological constructs. These include electroencephalography, electrocardiography, electrodermal activity, electromyography, electrooculography, and respiration, as well as validated measures of mindfulness, empathy, interoception, self-efficacy, and anxiety.
Description:
The proposed workshop will commence with a theoretical discussion of social physics, relational neuroscience and EEG hyperscanning in clinical encounters, followed by an expanded treatment of hardware options, including comparative demonstrations of EEG, fNIRS, and wearable-only configurations. Expert insights into clinical protocols that incorporate wearable-based physiological and psychological measures into group therapy frameworks will be presented.
Further sessions will center on analytics and application with two themes highlighted, one focusing on physiological synchrony (using ECG, EDA, and respiration) and the other on neuro-physiological synchrony (EEG and related measures). Each theme will include dashboard demonstrations of recurrence quantification analysis and wavelet coherence as well as comparison of real synchrony data with randomized pseudo-pairs. These two themes will be followed by an interactive session on the design of closed-loop group interventions, highlighting heart rate variability biofeedback, entrainment strategies, and mobile app-based reinforcement, while reviewing both supporting evidence and cautions. Finally, a translational panel discussion will bring together clinical, engineering, and industry perspectives to address practical challenges, ethical considerations, and reproducibility standards.
Program
Time | Activity |
08:30am -9:00am | Welcome Note and Workshop Overview (Abe Elfadel and Herbert Jelinek, Khalifa University) |
9:00am – 10:00am | Digital Group Therapy: Roadmap for Interdisciplinary Research (Herbert Jelinek, Khalifa University) |
10:00am – 10:30am | Coffee Break |
10:30am – 11:30am | Cognitive Workload Management: Vigilance Enhancement and Stress Mitigation (Hasan Al Nashash, American University of Sharjah) |
11:30am – 12:30pm | Social Physics (Fedor Vasilievich Kusmartsev, Khalifa University) |
12:30pm – 1:30pm | Lunch |
1:30pm – 2:30pm | Next Generation Edge-AI Wearables (Taraneh Najafi, EPFL) |
2:30pm – 3:30pm | A Game-Theoretical Perspective on Digital Group Therapy (Julian Gomez, Khalifa University) |
3:30pm – 4:00pm | Coffee Break |
4:00pm – 4:30pm | Panel: Challenges and Opportunities for Circuits and Systems in Digital Group Therapy |
4:30pm – 5:00pm | Wrap-up and Summary |
Desired Outcome:
The desired outcome is to raise the level of awareness, within the BioCAS community, as to the amazing the potential that Digital group Therapy holds for the BioCAS community, especially in terms of the instrumentation, hardware-software co-design, and system deployment of infrastructures that give therapists direly needed quantitative assessments of the individual progress of their patients in the group therapy context. Such infrastructures will play a major model in enabling predictive models for evaluation and intervention at both the group and individual levels.
Venue:
The workshop will be co-located with the BioCAS 2025 conference and take place immediately after the main conference on Sunday, October 19, 2025,8:30am – 5:30pm, at Khalifa University.
Fees:
Workshop registration will use the same IEEE registration web portal as BioCAS2025, and each delegate will be charged a flat fee of $100. Workshop-only participation is available upon request. Two coffee breaks and lunch will be served to workshop participants.
Contact:
Ibrahim (Abe) M. Elfadel, ibrahim.elfadel AT ku.ac.ae
Herbert Jelinek, herbert.jelinek AT ku.ac.ae