IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine
Special Issue in "Wireless Technologies for E-healthcare"
Call for Papers
The emerging information and wireless communication technologies in Health and Healthcare lead to eHealth systems, also known as E-healthcare, which have been drawing increasing attention in the public and have gained strong support from government agencies and various organizations. For example, Body Area Networks (BANs) (or Body Sensor Networks (BSNs)) are emerging and are envisioned to be a promising approach for remotely monitoring patient health and disease progression. In BANs, wearable, implantable, or portable medical wireless sensors can be implanted within patients� bodies to monitor the physiological conditions within the bodies and then send the patient information to a remote healthcare provider over the Internet, in order for the patients to receive high quality healthcare from healthcare experts on time but without seeing the experts in person. It can help patients to avoid lengthy waiting times and hospital stays. New interactive and real-time applications can provide users with instructions (e.g., from remote advisers) to execute optimal training programs according to the sensed raw data. Also, radio-frequency identification (RFID) is emerging as a promising technology to enable healthcare facilities to improve overall safety and operational efficiency, such as the supply and demand in hospitals and healthcare, where RFID tags are attached to medical personnel (including doctors and nurses, and patients) can facilitate to identify bottlenecks of supply and demand among them.

The new wireless technologies offer many advantages over conventional healthcare systems from efficiencies in the hospital clinic to new ways to monitor patient health and disease progression. They also open up possibilities of new health enhancement systems for the future. However, the design of eHealth systems comes with a set of newly emerged challenges due to requirements for accuracy, security and privacy of electronic health information, strict regulatory compliance, low network latency, low packet loss, high availability, small device size with power constraints, and multi-hop short-distance communications.

Scope of Contributions

This special issue is to disseminate the state-of-the-art research and development on wireless technologies for e-healthcare, highlight research challenges and open issues, and bring together researchers and medical professionals from the academia, industry and government with the goal of fostering interaction among them. Original, unpublished contributions and invited articles will be considered for the special issue. The topics of interest for the special issue include, but are not limited to:

* Multiple access control protocol design
* QoS provisioning
* Energy-efficient algorithms
* RFID applications in e-healthcare
* Wireless implantable devices
* Mobile patient monitoring devices and systems
* Interactive and real-time BANs systems for health enhancement
* Telemedicine system
* Wireless multimedia platforms
* Security, privacy and legal issues in e-healthcare
* Standardisation
* Case studies


Manuscript Submission

Authors should send an electronic version (postscript or PDF files ONLY) via email to one of the Guest Editors. The authors are also requested to submit a separate cover letter via email to the Guest Editors, which contains the paper title, authors with affiliations, and a 250-word abstract. The "Subject field" of the email must contain "IEEE WCM E-healthcare Paper". Articles should have no more than 4500 words, no more than 6 tables/figures, andthe abstract should have no more than 250 words. With regard to both the content and formatting style of the submissions, prospective contributors should follow the IEEE Wireless Communications guidelines for authors, which can be found at: http://www.comsoc.org/pubs/pcm/pub_guidelines.html.

Schedule

Manuscript Submission - April 1, 2009
Acceptance Notification - August 1, 2009
Final Manuscript - October 1, 2009
Publication Date - February, 2010

Guest Editors

Prof. Xuemin (Sherman) Shen (xshen@bbcr.uwateloo.ca), University of Waterloo, Canada
Prof. Nei Kato (kato@it.ecei.tohoku.ac.jp), Tohoku University, Japan
Prof. Xiaodong Lin (xiaodong.lin@uoit.ca), University of Ontario Institute of Technology, Canada