The decreasing care ratio and increasing age of the worldwide population is rendering solutions for supporting healthy ageing and independence of the elderly a necessity. The widespread use of innovative technologies in healthcare is paving the road for new paradigms in self-care and healthy ageing. Visual sensing is gaining ground in everyday life, with new wearables being introduced, such as cameras integrated in glasses like Google Glass, Pivothead , other wearables like Narrative , GoPro , the Polaroid cube , even contact lenses in the future . Ambient visual sensors are already present in peoples’ homes, either for security purposes, or for gaming (e.g. the Kinect or Wii Fit). Medical imagery also plays a central role in healthcare, with significant progress having already taken place in the field. Advanced methods for analysing medical images to accurately detect and characterize their content have been developed and will be discussed in this Special Session.

Wearable visual sensors can give a picture of a person’s daily activities from their own perspective, recording how they perform daily activities (such as washing dishes, making a phone call), what objects they interact with, who they interact with. They can thus provide in depth understanding of a person’s lifestyle, their abilities to carry out everyday activities, their level of sociability, the environment and context in which they live. In the realm of healthcare applications, the deployment of wearable visual sensors allows the monitoring of progress or deterioration of a person’s condition, as they clearly show how the individual carries out daily activities and how these abilities may change over time. They may also show how their lifestyle and sociability levels change over time, through long-term profiling of activity levels, daily life routines, places they frequent, as well as detect emergencies in real time.

The automated analysis of data from ambient visual sensors can provide a picture of a person’s daily activities and daily routine, from an observer’s standpoint. Ambient visual sensors allow the detection and recognition of activities of daily living, and provide valuable information about the way these are carried out since they show the entire person. As for wearable visual sensing, emergencies can also be detected in real time. Color and depth information complement each other for the recognition of daily activities when several people are in a room. An added benefit of these visual sensors is their unobtrusiveness, which allows individuals to go about their daily life as usual.
This Special Session aims to present the latest advances in image and video processing of both ambient and wearable visual sensors, with particular focus on healthcare applications, such as the recognition of activities of daily living of elderly in a hospital lab environment, or in their home. Its goal is to support and promote advances in visual sensing for healthcare, as this modality can provide a comprehensive picture of the lifestyle of individuals, of their condition, and these change over time. Safety applications such as the online detection of emergencies are also a useful by-product of such sensing.

Finally medical image analysis has received significant attention in the past years, and is expected to continue to play a central role in modern healthcare. The proliferation of imagery in medical devices and the continuous improvements in its quality and availability make its automated analysis a necessity, where interesting research is taking place.