MIIRH 2013 - First ACM MM Workshop on Multimedia Indexing and Information Retrieval for Healthcare (ACM MM MIIRH)

The worldwide increase in average life expectancy, the improvement of healthcare and the higher average age of the workforce is significantly affecting society, healthcare systems and world economies. Multimodal data is playing an increasingly significant role in healthcare, with sophisticated technologies involved in monitoring and diagnosis, the advent of smart homes enabling accurate and effective remote monitoring and care allowing elderly to live independently and remain active members of society. The processing of great quantities of multimodal data, i.e. “big data”, is regarded as a necessary complement to physicians’ diagnoses, with computers able to process vast amounts of multimodal data, statistics and the medical literature in an efficient manner, greatly supporting health professionals. Multimodal data analysis, information retrieval and indexing is thus central to health professionals, people with medical conditions and society at large, as such solutions significantly decrease the cost of healthcare, while guaranteeing comprehensive and high quality care and enabling the prolongation of independent living at home, and the good health of the ageing workforce.
MIRRH, held in conjunction with ACM MM 2013, will comprise the first Workshop on Multimedia Information Indexing and Retrieval for Healthcare and form a platform for the continued discussion of key research issues in multimedia for healthcare, remote monitoring and treatment. Multimodal monitoring for health can take place at home, but should be discreet, unobtrusive and personalized. Theoretical, i.e. research-oriented and practical, application-specific issues related to the extraction of lifestyle, behavior and health information from multimodal data will be examined. The setup of smart homes is also of interest, as the latter need to ensure accurate, reliable, discreet and cost-efficient measurements, involving, among others, privacy protection and appropriate sensor placement. Marketing of multimodal remote monitoring options also needs to be examined carefully, as independent living at home, smart homes and remote care are forecasted to gain great importance in years to come. Workshop papers should thus focus on the analysis of multimodal data to obtain information pertinent to healthcare problems and also examine remote monitoring solutions. Personalization, unobtrusiveness, accuracy of analysis results, data storage, transmission, marketability and privacy concerns are among the many topics of interest.
The workshop will provide a forum for researchers from all over the world to share information on their latest investigations on multimedia information retrieval and indexing with healthcare applications. In addition to paper presentations and posters, MIIRH will feature an invited talk by Prof. Linda Shapiro on interdisciplinary challenges of pattern recognition in biomedical applications, among others.