Call for Papers

Conference Aims

The overall goal of the conference remains tightly coupled with the original aims of the field, to address a set of related technologies and concepts that help integrate healthcare more seamlessly into everyday life, regardless of space and time. To achieve this, it is necessary to take a multidisciplinary approach to Pervasive Healthcare Technology research and development.

The Pervasive Healthcare Community has a broad scope of research topics and concerns:

• identify and understand problems from a technological, social, and medical perspective (with a particular emphasis on understanding and supporting patient needs);
• design, implementation, and evaluation of supporting hardware and software infrastructures, algorithms, and applications; and
• organisational strategies that facilitate integration of Pervasive Healthcare Technology into the healthcare enterprise.

The 2013 edition of Pervasive Healthcare conference aims to gather technology experts, practitioners, industry and international authorities contributing towards the assessment, development and deployment of pervasive medical based technologies, standards and procedures.

Traditional healthcare environments are extremely complex and challenging to manage, as they are required to cope with an assortment of patient conditions under various circumstances with a number of resource constraints. Pervasive healthcare technologies seek to respond to a variety of these pressures by successfully integrating them within existing health care environments.
Technologies, standards and procedures on their own provide little and or no meaningful service. It is essential that pervasive healthcare environments, through a combined approach of data collection, data correlation and data presentation, assist health care professionals in delivering high levels of patient care, and empower individuals and their families for self-care and health management.

Contributions

We welcome contributions from the following fields:

• Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health Professions
• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
• Sensing Technologies and Distributed Computing
• Hardware and Software Infrastructures

Each paper will be blind, peer-reviewed by members of the Pervasive Health 2013 program committee with additional expert reviewers drawn from relevant research domains.
Submissions will be evaluated based on their originality, significance of the contribution to the field, technical correctness and presentation. The paper should make explicit how the work offers unique and substantial contribution beyond what has already been published or submitted.

We seek novel, innovative, and exciting work in areas including but not limited to:

Pervasive Healthcare Management

• Challenges surrounding data quality
• Identifying and addressing stakeholder conflicts: patient needs, caregiver needs, health professional needs, organisational needs
  
• Standards and interoperability in pervasive healthcare
• Business cases and cost issues
• Security and privacy issues
• Training of healthcare professional for pervasive healthcare
• Legal and regulatory issues
• Staffing and resource management

Understanding Users

• Identifying and addressing stakeholder conflicts: patient needs, caregiver needs, health professional needs, organisational needs
• Usability and acceptability
• Barriers to adoption, and enablers
• Social implications of pervasive health technology, and social inclusion
• Coverage and delivery of pervasive healthcare services
• Patient empowerment
• Diversity: population and condition-specific requirements
• Inclusive research and design: engaging underrepresented populations

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

• Physiological models for interpreting medical sensor data
• Activity recognition and fall detection
• User modelling and personalization
• Modelling of Pervasive Healthcare environments
• Sensor-based decision support systems
• Design and evaluation of patient and ambient-related sensors
• Wearable and implantable sensor integration
• Data fusion in pervasive healthcare environments
• Data mining medical patient records
• Software architectures e.g. Agent, SOA, distributed middleware
• Electronic Health Records (EHR)

Applications

• Autonomous systems to support independent living
• Clinical applications, validation and evaluation studies
• Telemedicine
• Chronic disease and health risk management applications
• Health/Wellbeing promotion and disease prevention
• Home based health and wellness measurement and monitoring
• Continuous vs event-driven monitoring of patients
• Smart homes and hospitals
• Using mobile devices in the storage, update, and transmission of patient data
• Wellbeing and lifestyle support
• Systems to support individuals with auditory, cognitive, or vision impairments
• Systems to support caregivers

Submissions

All accepted submissions will be published in IEEE Xplore Digital Library. Authors will also be invited to submit their camera-ready papers in ACM format, to be published in ACM Digital Library. The acceptance rate was around 30% for Pervasive Health 2010, 2011 and 2012.

Pervasive Health will accept submissions in the following categories:

Full papers (up to 8 pages submissions) - Full papers are submissions describing results and original research work not submitted or published elsewhere in one of the four main categories listed below. Full papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field.

Medical Perspective Abstracts (1-2 pages submissions) - Authors are invited to submit work in traditional medicine whose results are interesting to Pervasive Health audience. This track will give Pervasive Health attendees a way to learn about ongoing research initiatives, both in medicine and technology, and will provide presenters with an excellent opportunity to receive invaluable direct feedback from experts.

Short Papers and Posters (up to 4 pages long): short papers are envisioned as submissions describing original research that is much more focused and smaller in scope than full research papers. Short papers are not expected to provide all the details on the research, but rather focus on the most innovative and salient aspects. In addition, short papers are not expected to include a comprehensive review of related work. Short papers will be presented during the main track of the conference. Poster category combines submissions reporting on the progress of ongoing research and insights into the lessons learned from current (industrial, practitioners, government, etc.) pervasive healthcare practice.

Demos (2 pages submissions) - The demos track will showcase the latest developments and prototypes related to the topics of interest of the conference.
The expected demo submissions should describe the technical details of the demo alongside its contribution to the healthcare domain.

Workshop proposals (2 pages submissions) - Several workshops will be run in conjunction with the conference. The purpose of these workshops is to discuss work in progress and explore opportunities for new research related to pervasive healthcare.

Doctoral Consortium (4 pages) - This one-day event will enable doctoral students to present and reflect on their work alongside other doctoral students and a panel of experts. Submissions should include a description of work done, intended future work, alongside a specific research question or challenge that you would like to be discussed at the consortium.

Journal Special Issue

The best papers of the Conference will be invited to submit an extended version for a Special Issue on Methods of Information in Medicine Journal (impact factor 1.532 in 2011).

Important Dates (All times are AoE)

Workshop Proposal: November 16th, 2012
Full Paper Submission: February 1st February 15th, 2013 (extended)
Short Papers and Posters: March 1st 2013
Medical Perspective Abstracts: March 29th, 2013
Notification of Acceptance: March 22nd, 2013
Camera Ready: April 12th, 2013
Conference Dates: 5th – 8th May, 2013
Conference Venue: SAN SERVOLO ISLAND, Venice, Italy