2nd IEEE International Workshop on Consumer eHealth Platforms, Services and Applications (CeHPSA)
14th January 2011, Las Vegas, Nevada
Satellite Workshop of 9th IEEE Consumer Communications & Networking Conference

Goals and Topics

Healthcare globally is going through a major transition that promises to provide the unprecedented delivery of services in new and novel ways. Medical infrastructures, built on advances in information and communication technologies (ICT), aim to fully distribute services in a much more flexible way. This will enable the seamless flow of information within and amongst medical facilities, practitioners and service users. ICT will ensure that services are highly available and provide enriched information. Multiple modes of interaction will be possible and this will all happen regardless of a user’s location or the devices they use. This vision is commonly referred to as eHealth and is one of the most rapidly growing areas in health today with an estimated annual budget of Euros 17.4 billion in Europe and $36 billion in the US.

The drive towards this growth in interest can be directly attributed to the fact that healthcare is becoming increasingly more difficult to sustain because of the rising costs associated with people living longer and an increase in diseases, such as Alzheimer’s and dementia. This presents a unique opportunity to develop new and novel platforms services and applications that exploit information within and across the healthcare sector to significantly improve the quality of patient care and improve and execute clinical processes more efficiently. This will help to form a closer relationship between healthcare providers and service users and fundamentally help support people in their daily lives. Furthermore, it addresses the growing problem of healthcare seclusion amongst rural areas and low-income nations where they too, through eHealth, can benefit from life-critical information, help, support and training. All this has the ability to empower people and encourage personal consumer healthcare beyond what is currently possible.

Nonetheless, due to the potential criticality of healthcare and the complex coordination and delivery of healthcare services it is not surprising that we have not seen widespread adoption of ICT in health. Yet eHealth presents a unique and high impacting application of ICT. The healthcare domain is sensitive to change and this will require new processes, methodologies and tools and this comes at a time where sustainable health is becoming increasingly more difficult. The workshop seeks workshop proposal submissions (consisting of a paper) on all theoretical and practical aspects of next generation consumer eHealth platforms, services and applications, as well as experimental studies of fielded systems on topics including, but not limited to, those shown below:

Wearable and implantable sensors
Sensor Networks for ubiquitous and pervasive healthcare
Physiological models for interpreting medical sensor data
Energy harvesting
Wireless Body Area Networks
Wearable home based health monitoring technologies
Ambient Assistive Living
Wireless Homecare
Personal Healthcare (pHealth)
Stream reasoning algorithms for behaviour and activity monitoring
Semantic Web and Healthcare
Standards and Frameworks
Interoperability
Human to machine interfaces
Middleware for eHealth
Service and Device Discovery
Telemedicine
Clinical Applications and evaluations
Healthcare applications for chronic disease management
Health promotion and disease prevention
Support solutions for cognitive decline
Support for physical defects
Usability issues
Assistive Devices
Activity Recognition
Telerehabilitation
Electronic Patient Record
Implementations and case studies
Bioinformatics
Clinical Decision Support Systems
Clinical Informatics
Consumer Health Informatics
eHealth Grids
Privacy and Security Issues in Healthcare
Data Protection

Guidelines for Submission
Submitted papers must represent original material that is not currently under review in any other conference or journal, and has not been previously published. Paper length should not exceed five-page technical paper manuscript. The paper should be used as the basis for a 20 - 30 minute workshop presentation.

Papers should be submitted in .pdf format by selecting CCNC'12 on the EDAS paper submission website and then selecting the workshop submission link. Papers should be a maximum of 5 pages in length and follow the IEEE formatting rules.

All accepted papers will be published in the conference proceedings and on IEEE Xplore.

At least one author of accepted papers is required to register at the full registration rate.

Important Dates

Deadline for workshop papers: September 5, 2011
Acceptance of workshop papers: September 26, 2011
Camera-ready version (hard): October 14, 2011
Workshop presentations: January 14, 2012

Workshop co-Chairs
Dr Paul Fergus, Liverpool John Moores University, UK
Dr Mario Kolberg, University of Stirling, UK