2012 - IEEE Communications Magazine Communications in Ubiquitous Healthcare: Wireless Sensors, Networked Devices, Protocols and Solutions

Call for Papers
IEEE Communications Magazine

Communications in Ubiquitous Healthcare: Wireless Sensors, Networked Devices, Protocols and Solutions

Many countries continue to face the major challenge of economically supporting their welfare systems, particularly medical/health benefits. Without the introduction of alternative solutions to reduce the cost of conventional systems such as hospitalization and specialized institutions, the system will most likely collapse. For a long time, information and communications technologies (ICT) have been recognized as part of the solution to create new cost-effective solutions to reduce the cost of healthcare. For example, the Ubiquitous (U) Health Smart Home, a home equipped with ICT to support people directly in their home, has been identified by governments and medical institutions, as an important step towards financial savings, as well as a technologically and socially acceptable solution to maintain the current health welfare system.
The aim of the Ubiquitous Health smart home is to allow elderly and disabled persons to continue to live a more independent life as long as possible in their own home while receiving the required medical and safety assistance. Doctors and other Healthcare providers can continuously access their health status or situation to detect as early as possible through a flexible remote access any anomaly so they can immediately intervene. With the help of the U-Health smart home, doctors, nurses and other health-related personnel do not need being physically close to the patients and reversely reducing therefore the load on hospitals and specialized institutions while ensuring the safety of the patients.

While this concept had some difficulties to be fully realized, in recent years, tremendous advances in low-power electronics, nano/bio sensor technologies along with development of wired and wireless network technologies are facilitating the development of such solutions which are more and more requested by our societies. These advances have led to the development of small-sized wireless medical and environmental sensors that are capable of very efficiently monitoring physiological parameters of humans as well at the living environment. Further, advances in sensing and communication technologies, along with advances software engineering, make it possible today to build homes where healthcare providers could deploy novel health and safety applications. These solutions not only will improve the well-being and quality of health of people in their own home but could also benefit other places where the same technologies can be deployed such as smart spaces and smart hospitals.

This special issue aims to gather the latest results in this area of Ubiquitous Healthcare Smarthome, by providing a fresh snapshot of the current state-of-the-art in the design, implementation and evaluation of supporting design, hardware, software, algorithms, protocols and applications. Practical experiences, extensive experimentation, and lessons learned from deployment of real prototype systems, along with field trials, are welcome. In addition, original disruptive proposals and groundbreaking ideas appropriately written for the large readership of this magazine are highly encouraged. In summary, we are soliciting high-quality papers reporting original research results and practical experiences of system design, prototyping and deployment. The topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

Sensing of Vital Signs and Signatures
Wearable Medical Wireless Sensors,
Energy Saving for Long Time Monitoring
Software Architectures (Agent, SOA, Middleware, etc.)
UHealth Smart home Network Infrastructure and Gateway
Modeling Ubiquitous Healthcare Smart home Environment
Physiological Models for Interpreting Medical Sensor Data
User Modeling and Personalization
Autonomic Diagnosis and Situation Awareness (Fall, Activity, etc.)
Context Awareness and Autonomous Computing to Support Independent Living
Home based Health and wellness Measurement and Monitoring
Home based Health Monitoring and Intervention.
Smart Home Applications and Services
Security, Trust and Privacy
Legal and Regulatory Issues
Usability and Acceptability
Business Models for UHealth Smart homes
Submissions Guidelines
This Feature Topic Issue solicits original work that must not be under consideration for publication in other venues. Authors should refer to the IEEE Communications author guidelines at http://dl.comsoc.org/livepubs/ci1/info/sub_guideli... for information about content and formatting of submissions. Manuscripts must be written in English and contain substantial tutorial content and be readable to a broad general audience working in other fields. All articles must be submitted through IEEE Manuscript Central (http://commag-ieee.manuscriptcentral.com) before the deadline.
Schedule
Submissions deadline: June 30, 2011
Author notifications: August 31, 2011
Final manuscripts due: September 30, 2011
Publication date: January 2012

Guest Editors
Nazim Agoulmine, University of Evry, France
Tsong-Ho Wu, ITRI, Taiwan
Chi-Ren Shyu, University of Missouri, USA
Jamal Deen, Mc Master University, Canada
Pradeep Ray, University of New South Wales, Australia