Gurrin leads a group of ten researchers dedicated to developing assistive technologies using wearable sensors and data analytics. The highly interdisciplinary approach advanced by his group, "lifelogging", integrates computer science, cognitive science and data-driven healthcare analytics to generate next-generation digital records of the individual. The basic idea is to provide a non-invasive, secure and privacy-preserving personal big data archive monitoring and analysing the individual continuously, with a wide-range of positive applications.

He has secured research funding of over €5.2M (from Irish, EU and other international sources), co-authored patents with Samsung, licensed technologies to Irish startups, mentored new technology companies and has graduated 11 PhDs and supervised numerous MSc dissertations. He has a Google H-index of 39 from over 6,000 citations to his research works. In addition, he co-organises the QS meetup in Dublin and regularly speaks at major international events such as the Global Quantified-Self Conference and partner-events. He is the founder and co-organser of the Lifelog Search Challenge at ICMR, the NTCIR-Lifelog participation workshop and the ImageCLEF lifelog task. Finally he has been the general chair of many high-ranking computer science conferences, such as ECIR 2011 & MMM 2014, ACM ICMR 2020 and he has been the general co-chair of MB2016 & MMM2017, CBMI 2019, and will be the general co-chair of MMM 2022, ECIR 2023 and TPC co-chair of MMM'23. He holds position on numerous editorial boards and conference steering committees.