CLOSED – Software for Context-Aware and Smart Healthcare – Call for Papers

Calls for Papers4 min read
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Submission deadline: CLOSED

Publication: Nov./Dec. 2017

Health services provisioning is globally changing to take better care of an increasingly demanding population. Using information and communication technologies (ICT) in healthcare processes has given birth to electronic health and mobile health. On the basis of information provided by these health ICT systems and more general infrastructures emerging in the context of smart cities, the concept of smart health has recently been proposed as a step forward in the provisioning of healthcare services in environments with sensing and data analytics capabilities.

The adoption of the smart-health paradigm requires advances in many disciplines distributed across the Open Systems Interconnection architecture. At the lower levels, cyber-physical systems, which will provide higher levels with vast amounts of data, must be developed and deployed. At the middle levels, communication protocols must be designed and put in place so as to guarantee high connectivity and (in some cases) real-time response. Finally, at the upper levels, all the information is gathered, stored, and analyzed to provide suitable services to users.

The wide development of the Internet of Things (IoT) and cyber-physical systems and their adoption in the healthcare industry require smart-health solutions to consider the importance of gathering large amounts of data and possibly embrace the concept of big data. Moreover, the fact that healthcare is a pillar of any developed society suggests that smart health deserves special attention. In this sense, the healthcare field has specific features that make it interesting from a research perspective—for example, the need for security, privacy, safety, reliability, and dependability.

Another relevant aspect for smart health’s success is certification, standardization, and quality assurance. Currently, regulatory bodies are dealing with distributed solutions, but their interoperability requires significant investment. Healthcare traditionally has been a highly regulated industry. The increasing use of software-intensive systems for healthcare has created the need to rethink, revise, and extend existing regulatory frameworks to account for the emerging properties of connected, software-based devices and computational infrastructure. Particular challenges exist with the interoperability of software-intensive medical devices and health ICT infrastructure at the organizational, regional, national, and international level.

This IEEE Software theme issue aims is to explore recent advances in context-aware smart health to identify the challenges and opportunities for the software community that this research area will face in the near future. Smart health is gaining special attention because it has the enormous potential to improve and augment other well-established electronic-health and mobile-health solutions. We invite articles covering any aspect of engineering context-aware smart-health systems, including, but not limited to

  • industrially deployed smart-health systems, pilot tests, and case studies;
  • software to quickly analyze and present large amounts of healthcare data, using medical protocols for smart health;
  • IoT devices, architectures, and integrated services for smart health;
  • UI design for dealing with and presenting of long-term, low-latency analysis of large healthcare data;
  • product-line-engineering approaches for smart-health software families and their evolution and maintenance;
  • cognitive algorithms for smart health that handle dynamic context management;
  • quality assurance, certification, and regulation of software-intensive smart health;
  • smart-health prediction and prevention applications;
  • dependability and trust in smart health (certification, quality assurance, verification and validation, safety, reliability, and security and privacy);
  • interoperability of smart-health systems;
  • obstacles to (and solutions for) the adoption of smart health;
  • smart-health business models; and
  • smart health for chronic patients and serious diseases.

Questions?

For more information about the theme issue, contact the guest editors:

  • Agusti Solanas, Rovira i Virgili University
  • Jens H. Weber, University of Victoria
  • Ayse Bener, Ryerson University
  • Frank van der Linden, Philips
  • Rafael Capilla, Rey Juan Carlos University

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts must not exceed 3,000 words including figures and tables, which count for 250 words each. Submissions exceeding these limits might be rejected without refereeing. Articles deemed within the theme and scope will be peer reviewed and are subject to editing for magazine style, clarity, organization, and space. We reserve the right to edit the title of all submissions. Be sure to include the name of the theme issue for which you’re submitting.

Articles should have a practical orientation and be written in a style accessible to practitioners. Overly complex, purely research-oriented or theoretical treatments aren’t appropriate. Articles should be novel. IEEE Software doesn’t republish material published previously in other venues, including other periodicals and formal conference or workshop proceedings, whether previous publication was in print or electronic form. For more information, contact the guest editors at software6b-2017@computer.org.

For general author guidelines: www.computer.org/software/author.htm

For submission details: software@computer.org

To submit an article: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/sw-cs

 
IEEE Software

IEEE Software‘s mission is to be the best source of reliable, useful, peer-reviewed information for leading software practitioners—the developers and managers who want to keep up with rapid technology change. The authority on translating software theory into practice, this bimonthly magazine positions itself between pure research and pure practice, transferring ideas, methods, and experiences among researchers and engineers. Peer-reviewed articles and columns by real-world experts illuminate all aspects of the industry, including process improvement, project management, development tools, software maintenance, Web applications and opportunities, testing, usability, and much more.