Call for Papers
IEEE Communications Magazine

Special Issue on "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_guidelines.html 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 2011

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