Welcome message from the Chairs
On behalf of the entire organizing committee, it is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 6th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare (PervasiveHealth 2012). This is the first time PervasiveHealth happens in the United States in the sunny city of San Diego California. 2012 marks the 6th installment of a conference that truly captures the wide variety of research activities in the diverse field of pervasive healthcare, encompassing research from, e.g., Pervasive Healthcare Management, Understanding Users, Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, Technology, Applications.
Each PervasiveHealth conference represents a snapshot of our field, capturing the state-of-the-art in technology, the research challenges we are addressing, as well as the people that form the PervasiveHealth community. Each year's proceedings represent an opportunity to learn about new areas and identify upcoming research opportunities, and this year is no exception. PervasiveHealth 2012 continues the tradition of a single-track technical program that allows participants to experience the entire program in a variety of sessions including wellness and wellbeing, physical activities and self-monitoring, healthcare interdisciplinary design, healthcare user need, tools and infrastructures, pysch-physiological sensing, gait and activity recognition.
This year our international Program Committee, composed of 20 of the leading researchers in the field of ubiquitous computing, evaluated 74 submissions - 53 full papers and 21 notes. Using a multi-phase review process, initially each submission was reviewed by at least one member of the program committee and two or more external sub-reviewers. Of the 74 submissions, 10 were evaluated by 1 additional PC members. After an online discussion, 15 submissions were auto-accepted and 8 submissions were chosen for further review and discussion for one week with 3 PC chairs meetings held via Skype. Each meeting had an average duration of one hour. In total, the Program Committee and 70 external reviewers spent countless hours to provide feedback to the authors through 222 reviews. After this rigorous process, a total of 30 submissions - 18 full papers and 12 notes - were accepted for publication in these proceedings, representing an overall acceptance rate of 33.96% for full papers.
We feel our selective review process has resulted in a high-quality set of published papers. For the first time, we have actively encouraged authors of accepted full papers and notes to also submit a video or demo of their work, in order to better engage the audience and stimulate face to face discussions. To properly reflect the significance of the work represented in the adjunct program, these submissions also see a much tighter integration in the main program, with video presentations interspersed with the technical presentations of the main track, and posters and demos presented during breaks and the first day's welcome reception. Last but not least, Deborah Estrin’s keynote on "Telling traces" will offer a critical look “to learn from our own traces, and at the same time feedback data to clinicians to inform clinical care”.
Jakob Bardram, Alex Mihailidis and Monica Tentori
Pervasive Health 2012 Technical Programme Co-chairs
