Final submissions due: 1 June 2019
Publication issue: March/April 2020
In modern society, when digital technologies enable individuals to track health statistics such as humans’ daily activity and vital signs, new applications, systems, and designs are creating new opportunities for health. For example, applications for healthcare data collection and processing, systems of body area networks, and designs of wearable devices are emerging in healthcare. Embedding digital technologies into healthcare will allow providers to: 1) focus on the individual elements of caring, judgment, and emotional intelligence; 2) support cooperative care with individuals; 3) improve health outcomes; 4) enhance patient-doctor relationships; and 5) enable a critical shift to prevention, wellness, and self-care across the lifespan.
Connected health is a socio-technical model for healthcare management and delivery by using technology to provide healthcare services remotely. Connected health aims to maximize healthcare resources and provide increased, flexible opportunities for individuals to engage with clinicians and better self-manage their care. Connected health defines the use of Internet, sensing, communications, and intelligent techniques in support of health related applications, systems, and engineering. Connected health brings together multidisciplinary technologies to provide preventive or remote treatments by utilizing digital heath information structure while at the same time connecting patient and caregivers seamlessly in the loop of the healthcare ecosystem. The health information structure includes body sensor networks and intelligent techniques, such as from data to knowledge to decisions. The United States and European Union are two dominant markets for the use of connected health in home-care service. It partially contributes to the high availability of telephone and Internet service as compared to other parts of the world. Proponents of connected health believe that technologies can transform healthcare delivery and address inefficiencies. In particular, the technologies embed in the areas of work flow management, chronic disease management, and patient compliance of the US and global healthcare systems. Future connected health will be realized by providing rich medical information to each individual through replacing infrequent, clinic-based measurements with unobtrusive, continuous sensing, monitoring, and assessment. Connected health technologies will enable preventive health and personalized medicine and may significantly reduce healthcare costs. However, a number of challenges still need to be addressed to enable connected health worldwide.
This special issue of IEEE Internet Computing calls for research on various issues and solutions that can enable connected health. Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following:
Applications
• Public health and home monitoring
• Healthcare data processing, data analytics, and data mining
• Wearable computing, edge computing, and pervasive computing
• Artificial intelligence (AI) in healthcare
• Security, privacy, and trust for connected health services/applications
Systems
• Body area networks
• Implantable sensor networks
• Communication system design for connected health
• Integration of medical devices with wireless health
• Biomedical sensor monitoring system
• IoT system design for healthcare
Engineering technologies
• Design of wearable devices
• Smart garments/textiles
• Communication/network infrastructures and protocols
• Software, systems, and performance engineering for connected health
• Computing/storage infrastructures
Submission Guidelines
All submissions must be original manuscripts of fewer than 5,000 words, focused on connected health technologies. All manuscripts are subject to peer review on both technical merit and relevance to IEEE Internet Computing’s international readership–primarily practicing engineers and academics who are looking for material that introduces new technology and broadens familiarity with current topics. We do not accept white papers, and papers that are primarily theoretical or mathematical must clearly relate the mathematical content to a real-life or engineering application. To submit a manuscript, create or access an account on ScholarOne.
Questions?
Contact the Guest Editors (Gang Zhou and Honggang Wang) at ic2-2020@computer.org.