Don Samitha Elvitigala is a Lecturer in the Exertion Games Lab at Monash

His research investigates novel human augmentations that can enhance human capabilities by implicitly understanding humans' physical and mental behaviours. In particular, he explores how we can utilise everyday clothes and clothing accessories to develop augmented human interfaces.  He has published his work in premier peer-reviewed HCI conferences and journals, such as CHI, UIST, MobileHCI, UbiComp, and ToCHI. Some of his publications have received honourable mention award and best paper award.

Before joining Monash Don Samitha was a postdoctoral fellow in the School of Computer Science and Engineering at UNSW, Sydney where he co-created HCI BoDi Lab. At UNSW he investigated how a network of human augmentations can serve a community by context and environmental sensing.

He completed his Ph.D. in human-computer interaction (Uncovering the Potential of the Foot for Novel I/O Interfaces) at the Auckland Bioengineering Institute (ABI) of the University of Auckland, New Zealand in July 2021.  The concept of his Ph.D. dissertation was runner-up for the best presentation at the doctoral colloquium of UbiComp 2018. Also, his thesis won the best thesis award in ABI for 2021, was selected to the Graduate School dean's list, and was nominated for the ACM dissertation award.