Call for Papers

Journal of Pervasive and Mobile Computing
Special Issue on
Pervasive Healthcare

Pervasive Healthcare is currently one of the hottest research topics in the area of pervasive and mobile computing focusing on the integration and cooperation of two fundamental disciplines (Information and Communication Technologies and Medical Sciences) that have a great impact on the current society. One of the main purposes of this research field consists in the design and development of information systems able to support medical professionals both improving patients’ Quality of Life and reducing medical errors and hospitalization costs. Continuous remote monitoring of patient’s physiological state and activity patterns, tracking of individual’s health-related activities, smart management of medical records and care professionals activities are just some examples of system features.

To allow this, a multidisciplinary approach is necessary, both in terms of cooperation among ICT and medical experts to correctly address patients and doctors requirements with new technological solutions, and inside the ICT community, to better integrate research efforts derived from different areas, from wearable and ubiquitous technologies to context-awareness, sensor data fusion, activity recognition, Artificial Intelligence, expert systems, databases and Human Computer Interaction. The proposed solutions must also contend with the resource limitations associated with commercial devices (e.g., energy consumption), communication infrastructures, and security and privacy issues related to critical and highly sensitive information.

In this special issue, we are seeking high quality papers reporting original research results on topics that include, but are not limited to:

- Wearable and implantable sensors for healthcare
- Wireless communications in healthcare
- Activity and context recognition for healthcare applications
- Service and device discovery
- Data fusion and context elaboration
- Privacy and security issues in healthcare
- Middleware for e-Health
- Energy efficiency in health monitoring
- Artificial intelligence and expert systems
- Human computer interaction, usability and acceptability of e-Health systems
- Home monitoring and ambient assisted applications for healthcare
- Power management and energy-efficient design in wireless body area networks
- System architecture and networking protocols for e-health systems
- Medical data analysis, measurements and management
- Modeling and performance evaluation
- Standards and frameworks

A key criterion in the evaluation of papers will be the relevance of the work for healthcare applications with a preference for work that includes empirical evaluation in actual healthcare domains.

Submission process:
Authors should prepare and submit manuscripts according to the Guide for Authors as published in the Journal website at http://www.ees.elsevier.com/pmc/. Please make sure to choose “SI: Pervasive Healthcare” from the pull-down menu during the submission process. Manuscripts must not have been previously published or currently under consideration for publication elsewhere. If a similar version of the paper has been published in a conference or workshop, the submitted version should contain significant additions/enhancements (with at least 33% new material). Authors are requested to submit their relevant, previously published articles and a summary document explaining the enhancements made in the journal version.

Important Dates:
Paper submission: July 29, 2011
Reviews and decision: December 16, 2011 (includes two rounds of reviews)
Submission of accepted manuscripts: January 20, 2012
Special issue: May 2012

Guest Editors of Special Issue
Diane Cook, Washington State University, USA, cook@eecs.wsu.edu
Franca Delmastro, National Research Council of Italy (CNR), Italy, franca.delmastro@iit.cnr.it
Paul Lukowicz, University of Passau, Germany, Paul.lukowicz@uni-passau.de
Marjorie Skubic, University of Missouri, USA, skubicm@missouri.edu