WISH 2020: The 2nd IEEE International Workshop on Integrated Smart Healthcare

Call for Papers

Goal of the workshop:

Designing pervasive systems for Smart Healthcare environments poses many challenges, e.g. with respect to intelligence, scalability, interoperability, robustness, analytics, monitoring, user involvement, safety and privacy, etc. The goal of this workshop is to explore these challenges through practical and buildable solutions. We aim to gather the principal practitioners and their experiences under one roof to discuss their findings, incite collaboration and move the state of the art forward. We plan to position this forum as the premier venue for presenting and discussing work in progress in how to develop and maintain pervasive computing solutions in Smart Health domain.

Workshop theme:

Healthcare is an ever-growing industry all over the world with a steady pace. Both social and commercial implications of healthcare are manifold. Traditional healthcare services have two major drawbacks. First, they are not available all the time and everywhere. Ailing individuals have to visit the caregivers or vice versa to get the healthcare services. This puts a constraint on the patients, especially elderly and/or disabled individuals, and requires sudden medical attention to thwart possible long-term impediment. Second, prevailing healthcare infrastructure and personnel are insufficient to accommodate the needs of the increasing population. Moreover, the changing demographics, like the rapidly aging population of the world, and factors like pollution and stress put considerable strain on the already fragile healthcare infrastructure.

In order to address the above challenges, Smart healthcare emerges as a novel technology that aims to provide round-the-clock monitoring of several vital signs of patients using various health sensors, specialized communication protocols, and intelligent context-aware applications. Smart healthcare applications proactively contact the caregiver provided any abnormality arises in the health condition of a monitored patient. It has been a boon to the patients suffering from different diseases and requiring continuous monitoring and care, such as, disabled individuals, assisted living, children of different ages, and adults who are susceptible to near-fatal falls or sudden increases in blood pressure, heart rates, stress level, etc. Since, there are heterogeneous devices and communication technologies introduced by different companies, major issues that need to be addressed are (1) A unified platform to facilitate coordination between the large-scale device distributions, (2) plug-and-play type inclusion of newer health sensors and replacing old ones without destabilizing the system, (3) Securing personal health records collected over multiple devices, and finally (4) collecting, managing, storing and making decisions over several critical healthcare events composing various real-time data traces. Applying machine intelligence techniques by AI (Artificial Intelligence) and ML (Machine Learning) researchers for intelligent and decentralized decision making in Healthcare should also be considered for the distributed Smart Health applications.

Scope of the workshop:

The workshop is supposed to stir interesting discussions on various challenging topics on smart healthcare, such as, data acquisition and context reasoning, analytics and knowledge management, architectural and algorithmic issues, energy-efficiency, data verification, complex pervasive computing interactions, cost efficiency, data privacy and security, etc.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:
• Wearable and implantable wireless sensors for healthcare
• Computing for Health Internet-of-Things
• IoT-Health case studies, testbeds & experimental results
• Interoperable & connected medical devices
• Distributed Smart Health platform comprising multiple sensors
• Energy efficiency in wireless health monitoring
• Usability, user friendliness and reusability
• Safety-critical smart health systems
• Communications infrastructure for mobile healthcare apps
• Protocols for wireless healthcare
• Secure Computing for Healthcare Systems
• Securing healthcare data exchange
• Interference analysis & mitigation for IoT-health devices
• Performance modelling of mobile healthcare systems
• Big data in healthcare
• Scalability, performance and reliability of smart health mobile apps
• Data fusion, data mining and event detection
• Diagnostic and decision support algorithms (using Machine Learning and AI)
• Computing platforms for natural language processing on electronic health records
• Patient tracking & localization technology
• Detection, control and spread of epidemics
• Predictive analytics for Rural Healthcare solutions
• Multi-modal device interaction
• People-Sensing and Crowdsourcing
• User experience and adaptation
• Accessibility
• Decision theoretic models in rural healthcare
• Hardware assisted intelligent systems design for smart healthcare applications
• Intelligent hardware / embedded systems for smart healthcare
• Application of emerging technologies in smart healthcare systems design
• Other emerging design / modelling aspects of such systems / applications
We also welcome papers on novel applications or environments that have a strong Smart Health component,
especially if those novel applications and environments challenge existing ideas and design techniques.

Likely participants: Researchers and practitioners working in numerous areas of computer science and
healthcare are called to participate and exchange their research, ideas, and techniques.