WATT 2015 - 9th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare

Traditional forms of healthcare have been challenged by the new highly flexible and customizable pervasive paradigm. Many pervasive solutions to health rely on sending patient data to the expert clinicians which in turn respond to the alarms received, but fail to make the pervasive solution intelligent enough to reduce the demand of expert time and availability as well as collect data transparently for the patient. One of the keys to the success of the ubiquitous paradigm to deliver health to the population is the ability for dynamically customize interventions; treatments (the curing agent) and therapies (the rehabilitation programme), to the changing patient needs whilst still guaranteeing compliance with treatment and therapy demands. Adaptive treatments and therapies (ATTs) are a necessary step to make pervasive health a democratic form of health care delivery; available to anyone, anywhere, anytime. This dynamic customization or adaptive behaviour is ultimately responsible for the pervasive solution to reduce exhaustive expert supervision; a critical advantage to reduce health delivery costs, permit out-ward continuous supervision, motivate patients through personalized care, and achieve an anytime health assistance. Common to all of these intelligent ATTs solutions is a decision-making engine. Manifestation of this engine comes in many flavours; from naïve prefixed thresholds to sophisticated artificial intelligence approaches, from solutions only relying on observable metrics to elaborated algorithms inferring affective and cognitive states of the patient, from those offering a deterministic decision over a certain scenario to those affording probabilistic advice intelligently managing uncertainty and being context aware. Yet, despite all the latest advancements, ATTs are still far from fulfilling their potential of making pervasive health virtually autonomous with minimal human expert intervention.
Objectives
Ultimately, this workshop aims to elucidate why despite all the latest advancements, ATTs are still far from fulfilling their potential of making pervasive health solutions virtually autonomous with minimal human intervention. More specifically, the workshop is organised aiming to address and hopefully answer some of the following questions:
What is it that is delaying the final explosion of ATTs to reach real ubiquity (anyone, anytime, anywhere) for health care and medical training?
What are the main avenues that research in this field should take to accelerate translation to the health care community and society?
Are we putting too much effort in the out-hospital technology that we are forgetting about the basic medical necessities thus preventing wider acceptance?
What design implications put adaptive treatment and therapies on pervasive technologies?
What are the technological and non technological present and future limits of ATTs for being ubiquitous in health care and medicine?
Are the current research standards in ubiquitous health in general, and ubiquitous ATTs in particular, depreciated to embolden real breakthroughs (e.g. low quality studies, marginal scientific increments, overemphasizing and favouring experimental over analytical grounds, etc)?