Hey there 👋

I'm Lidia Alecci

Ph.D. student at Università della Svizzera Italiana (USI) (Lugano, Switzerland)

As a Ph.D. student at USI since October 2021, I specialize in wearable computing and its applications for enhancing human well-being. My research particularly focuses on tackling the challenge of inter-personal variability — differences in physiological and behavioral patterns across individuals — by combining generalized models with personalized approaches.

Selected publications

What the Heart Can(not) Tell: Potential and Pitfalls of Biometric Recognition Methods Based on Photoplethysmography

Lidia Alecci, Matías Laporte, Leonardo Alchieri, Nouran Abdalazim, and Silvia Santini. 2025. What the Heart Can(not) Tell: Potential and Pitfalls of Biometric Recognition Methods Based on Photoplethysmography. Sensors 25, no. 24: 7586. https://doi.org/10.3390/s25247586

Paper Code

Robust PPG Authentication: The Role of Temporal, Individual, and State Variability

Lidia Alecci, Alessandro Zanzi, Matías Laporte, Leonardo Alchieri, Nouran Abdalazim, Giovanni De Felice, and Silvia Santini. 2025. Robust PPG Authentication: The Role of Temporal, Individual, and State Variability. In Companion of the 2025 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp Companion '25), October 12-16, 2025, Espoo, Finland. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 8 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3714394.3756172

Paper Presentation Code

Enhancing XGBoost with Heuristic Smoothing for Transportation Mode and Activity Recognition

Lidia Alecci, Leonardo Alchieri, Nouran Abdalazim, Pietro Barbiero, Silvia Santini, and Martin Gjoreski. 2023. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing & the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing (UbiComp/ISWC '23 Adjunct). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 540‐545. https://doi.org/10.1145/3594739.3610752

Paper Presentation

Prediction of upper limb chorea severity using passive monitoring smartwatch motion sensor data in individuals with Huntington's disease

Lidia Alecci, Jonas Dorn, Florian Lipsmeier, Johannes Rennig, Atieh Bamdadian, Fiona Kinsella, Peter McColgan, Michael Lindemann, Edward J Wild and Cedric Simillion. 2023. CHDI 2023 Poster (Roche).

Paper

Selected code repositories

Potential and Pitfalls of Biometric Recognition Methods Based On Photoplethysmography

This project evaluates PPG-based user recognition methods using wearable data across controlled and real-world conditions.

Robust PPG Authentication

Investigating how three three real-world sources of variability — temporal variability (elapsed time between enrollment and authentication), user-specific variability, and state-dependent variability (e.g., stress, sleep, mood) — affect the reliability of user identification based on photoplethysmography (PPG) signals.

Transformer

Transformer encoder-decoder model to solve mathematical problems.

Spreading Tweet News Project

Spreading tweet news simulation, case study of Giuseppe Conte followers network.