Call for Papers

EAI PervasiveHealth 2021 will be held as a fully-fledged online conference (with an on-site possibility).

In 2020, EAI successfully launched an online conference format to ensure the safety, comfort and quality of experience for attendees and a successful course of the events, all while retaining fully live interaction, publication and indexing. Due to the unrelenting global pandemic, this will also be the case in 2021.

Although we will miss having everyone meet and connect in person, we feel strongly that knowledge exchange must continue, if not more so. That is why we have equipped our online conferences with live viewing with chat, virtual Q&A, and a multitude of other measures to provide you with a great experience. Learn more about EAI’s online conferences.

If the situation allows it, the event will take place in its original location with an option to present remotely. In any case, all matters related to publication and indexing will remain unchanged.

Scope

PervasiveHealth is a premier international forum with a specific focus on technologies and human factors related to the use of ubiquitous computing in healthcare and for wellbeing. The overall goal of the PervasiveHealth conference is to take a multidisciplinary approach to Pervasive Healthcare, technology, research and development.

PervasiveHealth is addressing a broad scope of research topics and concerns: identify and understand problems from a technological, social, medical, and legal as well as financial perspective (with a particular emphasis on understanding and supporting patient and practitioner needs), design, implementation, and evaluation of supporting hardware and software infrastructures, algorithms, services and applications, and organizational strategies that facilitate integration of Pervasive Healthcare technology into the healthcare enterprise.

Traditional healthcare environments are extremely complex and challenging to manage, as they need 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 healthcare environments.

The year of 2020 was challenging in all dimensions of Pervasive Health. Traditional ways of monitoring, diagnosing, treating and communicating/relationships between healthcare providers, patients and their families/caregivers changed dramatically, at once, and challenged the healthcare sector, industry and decision makers. The challenges were clinical, technological, legal and social. Furthermore, the Covid-19 pandemic brought some opportunities and the new technologies developed/adapted for care as well as new care models are here to stay.

It is essential that Pervasive Healthcare environments, through a combined approach of data collection, data correlation and data presentation, assist healthcare professionals in delivering high levels of patient care, and empower individuals and their families for self-care and health management.

PervasiveHealth 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.

Looking forward we need to understand which care models and technologies should be implemented in current\future care and how can we implement the technologies and combine them with the “human factor” to yield best results for future healthcare.

The PervasiveHealth conference this year will focus on lessons learned from the last year (of Covid-19), new technologies designed and developed to face the challenges, and the way healthcare systems should be re-designed in collaboration with the industry, academia and decision makers to create advanced care systems.

Israel has led the world in rolling out its COVID-19 vaccination program. This experience by itself provides lessons that others can learn from. However, Israel also has a number of other advantages, relevant to PervasiveHealth, including a strong consolidated public health infrastructure and a well-known AI-based technologies industry. These provided the country with special abilities to enhance remote care, further development and rapid implementation and deployment of AI-based decision support platforms in ERs, ICUs, Corona wards and community care. The lessons that can be learnt include the importance of coordinating delivery mechanisms with the inevitable prioritization of groups within the population, a recognition that not everyone in the population shares in the benefits of digital connectedness, the need to reach out to disadvantaged groups, based on an understanding of the barriers that they face, and the importance of placing COVID-19 vaccination within a comprehensive response to the pandemic.

Submit paper

We welcome contributions from the following fields:

Hospital and Community Care
Technologies have been implemented in hospital and community setting and paved the way to remote monitoring, intervention and follow-up. Some of the technologies were incorporated in the existing workflows and in some cases, new workflows were designed. The implementation process included technologies fine-tuning and adaptation, creation of new care models and consideration of legal (privacy) challenges. The human factor was challenged and lessons are learned for future care.

Homecare
Isolation and homecare were prioritized as no face-to-face appointments were possible. New healthcare services were implemented to diagnose, treat and follow-up patients at home and special patient groups such as mental health patients, elderly, children and individuals being hospitalized at home received special attention within the homecare setting. However, the relevance of these services to daily routine care, using the homecare setting, remains if not increases and lessons learned should be implemented in the design of present/future homecare services.

Education of Next Generation of Healthcare Professionals, Health-tech Developers & Entrepreneurs
The use of technologies and re-design of healthcare services raised the need for new skills among healthcare professionals as well as close collaboration of multidisciplinary teams in design, development and implementation of new technologies in healthcare. In particular, it calls for a new approach to research and development (R&D) of healthcare products and services that include a shorter product life cycle and regulation adaptation. The importance of data-driven care was raised significantly and thus the need for AI-based platforms collecting, analyzing and validating healthcare data in real-time for clinical purposes, especially personalized treatment.

Yet, the healthcare professionals and the industry require additional skills to face the emerging challenges in healthcare. How can we provide healthcare professionals with the necessary knowledge and tools to cope with these challenges? How can we better educate the next generation of physicians, nurses and technology experts to deal with future challenges?

The following topics are in relation to the conference focus:

• Sensing/Actuating Technologies and Pervasive Computing
• Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
• Identifying and Addressing Stakeholder Needs
• Usability and Acceptability
• Barriers and Enablers to Adoption of New Technologies and Care Models
• Social Implications of Pervasive Health Technology and Social Inclusion
• Patient and Caregiver Empowerment
• Digital Interventions and Health Behavior Change
• Autonomous Systems to Support Independent Living
• Clinical Applications, Validation and Evaluation Studies
• Telemedicine and mHealth Solutions
• Chronic Disease and Health Risk Management Applications
• Health/Wellbeing Promotion and Disease Prevention
• Home-based Healthcare and Wellness Measurement and Monitoring
• Continuous vs. Event-driven Monitoring of Patients
• Smart Homes
• Activity Recognition and Fall Detection
• User Modelling and Personalization
• Sensor-based Decision Support Systems
• Data Fusion in Pervasive Healthcare Environments
• Business Cases and Cost Issues
• Security and Privacy Issues
• Training of Healthcare Professional for Pervasive Healthcare
• Legal and Regulatory Issues
• Education and Acquired Skills

Full papers 12 to 15 pages:
Full papers are submissions describing results and original research work not submitted or published elsewhere in one of the three main categories and/or list of topics mentioned above. Full papers should place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field. The limit for full papers is 12 to 15 pages (inclusive of the abstract, main text, and any tables consisting mostly of text; not inclusive of references).

Short papers 6 to 11 pages:
Short papers are original contributions presenting novel, thought-provoking ideas and addressing innovative application areas in one of the three main categories and/or list of topics mentioned above. The inclusion of promising (preliminary) results is encouraged but not required. Papers that stimulate and promote discussion are particularly encouraged. Short paper submissions should be 6-11 pages in length plus additional pages for references.

Abstract submissions:
Submitting abstracts offers researchers the chance to share their preliminary findings at the convention, helping to boost research as it progresses and enabling the exchange of the latest findings at PervasiveHealth.
Abstract submissions should be up to 300 words long.

Presentation Format

Full papers – 20 min oral presentation
Short papers and Abstracts –  15 min oral presentation

All papers will be presented live during the conference. Authors are invited to also submit a recording of their presentation to [email protected] for YouTube publishing and further promotion: Recording instructions

Publication

Registered full papers, short papers, and workshop papers will be submitted for publishing by Springer and made available through SpringerLink Digital Library.

PervasiveHealth proceedings are indexed in leading indexing services, including Ei Compendex, Web of Science, Scopus, CrossRef, Google Scholar, DBLP, as well as EAI’s own EU Digital Library (EUDL).

Abstract submissions will be published online only.

All accepted authors are eligible to submit an extended version in a fast track of:

• EAI Endorsed Transactions on Pervasive Health and Technology (Open Access)
  – indexed in Ei Compendex & Scopus

Additional publication opportunities:

• EAI/Springer Innovations in Communications and Computing Book Series
  (titles in this series are indexed in Ei Compendex, Web of Science & Scopus)

Paper submission

Papers should be submitted through EAI ‘Confy+‘ system, and have to comply with the Springer format (see Author’s kit section).

All conference papers undergo a thorough peer review process prior to the final decision and publication. This process is facilitated by experts in the Technical Program Committee during a dedicated conference period. Standard peer review is enhanced by EAI Community Review which allows EAI members to bid to review specific papers. All review assignments are ultimately decided by the responsible Technical Program Committee Members while the Technical Program Committee Chair is responsible for the final acceptance selection. You can learn more about Community Review here.

Pervasive Health uses double-anonymous review. Authors should remove information about the authors from submissions and file metadata, and they should also remove the acknowledgements section from submissions. Authors should not remove references for review; please instead cite them in third person. E.g., rather than write “In our previous research [1], we demonstrated…”, write “Previous research [1] demonstrates…”.

Important dates