Focusing on the e-Health domain, ICEHST 2011 aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners whose work has impact on the development of actual healthcare technologies. Such technologies relate to advanced IT solutions and could facilitate activities of great societal relevance.
As acknowledged by the United Nations Development Programme, those nations that succeed in harnessing the potential of ICT (Information and Communication Technology) can look forward to greatly expand economic growth, dramatically improved human welfare, and stronger forms of democratic government. All these opportunities relate to the advances in service delivery, seen for instance in WST (Web-Service Technology). Having nowadays a positive impact on the healthcare service provisioning, WST has emerged and developed as an implementation of SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture). This ‘service orientation’ in turn relates to significant new possibilities for building (through service composition) powerful automated intelligent systems that adequately support sophisticated healthcare processes. These developments are further facilitated by the reduction in both the cost and size of medical equipment. Relevant technological trends concern increasingly pervasive sensing networks, higher processing power, and the ability to transfer data more quickly through both wired and wireless systems. Thus, particularly driven by this research focus, we are interested in the development and use of e-Health services as well as in their related technologies. Such services could actually be executed by ICT applications, being provided on a global scale, through distributed computing environments. e-Health services could therefore bring huge support to medical doctors and nurses, by allowing them, for example, to realize 24-7 remote monitoring of the vital signs of a patient. Such useful improvements could make care provisioning more accessible to broad societal circles – healthcare cost would go down if human healthcare workers are (partially) substituted by automated systems. However, all those impressive technological developments are only part of whole picture. It is to be taken into account that in spite these amazing developments and related large investments, we do not benefit to date from a smooth and commercially viable e-Health service provisioning. Furthermore, the development of e-Health services is currently slowing down, obviously because of the lack of a proper projection of the e-Health solutions in the real life. Hence, it is currently observed how e-Health moves to the phase of ‘disillusionment’ and this is an indication that we need to learn from the experience and be able to better utilize and adopt the advanced ICT for the benefit of health-care.
ICEHST 2011 main focus is on e-Health services and their related technologies, with a particular stress on the modeling of complex e-Health technology-driven service-provisioning systems. The target of ICEHST is to address the fundamental modeling challenges related to e-Health services. In approaching such services though, we are mainly concerned with Tele-Monitoring and Tele-Treatment, as two essential directions of supporting healthcare through advanced technology. By Tele-Monitoring we mean the monitoring of the patient’s condition (including the monitoring of vital signs, such as blood pressure and blood sugar), supported by technology systems. By Tele-Treatment we mean performing some forms of treatment from distance, for example through actuators.
These research directions essentially concern the Mobility aspect since both Tele-Monitoring and Tele-Treatment are realized from distance, through advanced mobile devices. There are open questions however, concerning the reliability of mobile technology ‘any time any place’, the operation of devices and batteries in ‘real’ conditions, and so on. The mentioned Mobility aspect points as well to the desired capability of (e-Health) systems to adequately react on changes in their environment, referred to as context awareness. We therefore acknowledge that technology-driven healthcare systems could only be really useful if they are context-aware. Finally, even though current technology helps in offering powerful support, providing the patient with complex and constant healthcare services (while keeping him/her in his/her own environment), there are important related concern, such as security and privacy, which need to be addressed also, since providing powerful (remote) support to patients would only make adequate value if patients’ data is treated in a secure and privacy-sensitive way.
The goal of ICEHST is therefore to address the fundamental modeling challenges related to e-Health services and technologies. We believe that this event will contribute to the dissemination of relevant research results, supporting in this way the wider applicability of advanced technology in healthcare.
Each year, a special theme is chosen, relevant to the defined scope, in order to make presentations and discussions more focused. The theme of ICEHST 2011 is:
INTELLIGENT SENSOR FACILITIES IN HEALTHCARE
ICEHST'11 invites papers that address one or more of the areas elaborated below. Authors should not feel limited by the topics mentioned. Unlisted but related topics are also acceptable, provided they are in the perspective of the conference theme and fit the main conference areas:
1. Monitoring Facilities
2. Treatment Facilities
3. The Role of Software and Hardware in Support of Monitoring and Treatment
AREA 1: Monitoring Facilities
› Disappearing Vital Signal Capturing Sensors
› Sensor Embedded and Integrated Data Analysis
› Sensor-'Cloud' Interaction and Collaboration
› Complementary Processing
› Monitoring Instructions (from the Cloud)
› Service Discovery by the Sensors
› Data Imperfection
› Privacy-sensitive Monitoring Protocols and ID Management
› Remote and Local Vital Signal Management
AREA 2: Treatment Facilities
› Limits of Remote Treatment and Diagnosis
› Decision for Intervention
› Adequacy of Monitoring Data
› Responsibility
› Risk Estimation
› Remote Control
› from the 'Cloud'
› from a Human
› Tele-centers as Facilities Facilitating Complex Interventions
AREA 3: The Role of Software and Hardware in Support of Monitoring and Treatment
› Software Components and Software Services
› ICT Applications
› Computing Platforms
› Interoperability and Scalability of Systems and Platforms
Hermann Maurer, Graz University of Technology, Austria
Mihail Konstantinov, University of Architecture, Civil Engineering and Geodesy / IICREST, Bulgaria
Check the detailed instructions on how and where to submit a paper.
All accepted papers (full, short and posters) will be published in the conference proceedings, under an ISBN reference, on paper and on CD-ROM support.
All papers presented at the conference venue will be available at the SciTePress Digital Library (http://www.scitepress.org/DigitalLibrary/). SciTePress is member of CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org/).
The proceedings will be submitted for indexation by Thomson Reuters Conference Proceedings Citation Index, INSPEC, DBLP and EI.
Conference date: 25-27 July, 2011
Regular Paper Submission: March 15, 2011 (expired)
Authors Notification (regular papers): April 29, 2011
Final Regular Paper Submission and Registration: May 19, 2011
ICEHST Secretariat
Address: IICREST c/o B. Shishkov
P.O. Box 104
1618 Sofia
Bulgaria
Tel.: +351 265 100 033
Fax: +44 203 014 8638
e-mail: icehst.secretariat@innov.org
Web: http://www.icehst.innov.org/
Available soon.
Dimitri Konstantas, University of Geneva / IICREST, Switzerland
Boris Shishkov, IICREST, Bulgaria
Dumitru Burdescu, University of Craiova, Romania
Tiago Guerreiro, Technical University of Lisbon, Portugal
Aart van Halteren, Philips Research, Netherlands
Dionisis D. Kehagias, CERTH, Greece
Preslav Nakov, National University of Singapore, Singapore
Mayumi Oyama-Higa, Osaka University, Japan
Samrend Saboor, UMIT - University for Health Sciences, Medical Informatics and Technology, Austria
George Tsihrintzis, University of Piraeus, Greece
Kataryzna Wac, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Ing Widya, University of Twente, Netherlands
(list not yet complete)