Arlene John is an Assistant Professor at the Biomedical Signals and Systems (BSS) group at the Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science faculty at the University of Twente. Dr. John’s research lies at the intersection of life sciences, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and clinical practice. Her goal is to develop reliable, affordable AI solutions that can continuously track patients’ health and provide decision support, both in hospitals and in low-resource settings.

With experience across four countries, five universities, and three companies, Dr John has built an international career at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, healthcare, and society. Her work focuses on utilising AI to make healthcare more personalised and effective—for example, within the 4TU RECENTRE program, she works on predicting and tracking long-term health effects following cancer or obesity treatments.

Ensuring Innovation Reaches Everyone:

Her research aims to ensure that technological innovation benefits everyone, including children, women, and patients in regions with limited access to healthcare. Dr John leads a national project on monitoring brain health in newborns and will soon visit Texas Children’s Hospital to develop transparent AI tools for analysing children’s heart signals. She is also designing AI methods to detect pregnancy-related heart problems—an area that remains largely overlooked in cardiology research.

Dr John has published in leading journals, and her forthcoming Springer Nature monograph (2025) will serve as a reference for multimodal AI in healthcare. Her commitment to open science is reflected in her open-access publications and publicly available reproducible code.

Beyond research, Dr John is deeply committed to teaching, mentorship, and outreach. She coordinates the BSc course Medical Sensors and Measurements, supervised over 25 bachelor’s and master’s students, and mentors three PhD candidates, helping bridge algorithm development with clinical application. She curates a podcast on smart sensors on Spotify and is an active member of her faculty’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) team.

Her leadership extends to international collaborations with hospitals and industry partners, including Apple and Philips, as well as editorial and organisational roles such as Associate Editor for the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference and Vice-Chair of the Big Data & AI theme at the University of Twente’s Cardiovascular Health Technology Centre. Dr John’s work showcases her intellectual originality and commitment to equity and accessibility in healthcare.