SSH 2016 - 4th International Workshop on Service Science for e-Health

Technological developments in computing and networking have largely made the delivery of health services, including medical diagnosis and patient care, possible from a distance. Many funded projects have evaluated and are evaluating the use of communications technology in the implementation and performance of telemedicine activities, and examined the impact of telemedicine on medical care in terms of cost, quality, and access. Telemedicine has become a growing new interdisciplinary field, which will eventually contribute to improving the quality of health care for everyone. However, successful implementation of this vision depends not only on innovative telemedicine applications but also on networking and computing technical readiness. Furthermore, many ethical, social, and political problems arising in telemedicine need technical solutions.
The key requirements for current and emerging healthcare systems are:
ubiquitous access to services (e.g. anywhere and anytime connectivity, user’s and service’s mobility);
delivery of personalized services, i.e., where the process of services composition and delivery is aware of location, presence, proximity, identity, content and context of users and services;
broadly understood security, e.g., data integrity and safety, services availability and dependability;
openness to new networking technologies and techniques for the purpose of flexible management of the quality of service (QoS) and delivery of high quality of experience (QoE).
The fulfillment of the above requirements will lead to the utilization of Future Internet architectures and concepts (e.g., Internet of Things, Internet of Services, Internet of Media) as well as new system design paradigms, (e.g., communication enabled applications, service oriented architecture, user centricity, content and context awareness) to design and implement advanced eHealth systems.
Service science is an emerging interdisciplinary approach to design, implement and evaluate complex service systems. It brings together science, ICT technologies and business to provide an added value to domain-specific applications of service-based systems. Service science is often defined as application of scientific, engineering, and management disciplines that integrate elements of computer science, operations research, industrial engineering, business strategy, management sciences, and social and legal sciences, in order to encourage innovation in how organizations create value for customers and shareholders that could not be achieved through such disciplines working in isolation.
The key assumption behind this idea is that the designed applications, systems and platforms should:
be scalable in terms of provided functionalities;
be independent from applied technologies;
adapt to an evolving business reality;
provide personalized complex services;
interconnect services from different service providers to meet users’ requirements;
allow for automatic optimization of provided services and system itself.
The application of service science in the eHealth area seems to be a natural approach to build platforms, systems and applications which meet current and future demands of the healthcare domain.
The main aim of the workshop is to bring together representatives of academia, industry and healthcare business to present recent advances in the field of eHealth. The most welcome are high quality interdisciplinary papers presenting utilization of service science to develop new or enhance existing healthcare systems and services.
All published workshop papers will be included in the IEEE HealthCom Proceedings and will be included on IEEExplore.