Message from the Conference Chair

Prof. Niilo Saranummi

I'm very happy to welcome the speakers and participants to my home town, Tampere. We'll see what the weather will be like when you arrive. Given the global warming pandemic we cannot any more guarantee a real Finnish winter at this latitude in January!

The first Pervasive Healthcare conference took place in December 2006 in Innsbruck, Austria. I had the pleasure to attend it as an invited speaker. As we all know ICT is a major enabler in the delivery of health services. We can dream of a pervasive health service environment where patient data can be collected anytime and anywhere and where that data and relevant medical knowledge is available when neededin the appropriate context. In realizing this dream we are confronted by several R&D challenges. Among the needs that must be met is a semantically interoperable health information infrastructure for storage and communication of patient records, personal health records and in the future also personal genomic profiles. Another need relates to personal devices and systems to collect health and patient data and to access and use electronic health services. In addition to building the infrastructure, the services and the devices we also need to figure out how the pervasive health environment will be constructed. The current illness focused health services need to be re-engineered into the pervasive "from cradle to grave" wellness and health services.

In this second conference we continue from where the Innsbruck conference ended; what further progress has been made in addressing the challenges of making health services truly pervasive using ICT both as an enabler and as an agent for changing the way health services and organized and delivered.

This event promises to be a major milestone in moving towards pervasive healthcare. In addition to the conference we have three workshops. We have an industry session to discuss how research can be translated into business. And above all, we have the coffee and lunch breaks, and evenings for informal discussions and exchange of ideas.


Niilo Saranummi
Conference Chair .