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ICT Platforms and Technologies for the Daily Management of Chronic Diseases and the Support of the Ageing Population

Special Session Call for papers

Public health is a key priority and is facing serious challenges in the near future of delivering quality healthcare to all its citizens, at affordable cost. The costs of managing chronic diseases, the prolonged medical care for the ageing society, and the increasing demand by citizens for best healthcare quality are major factors.

The population in the wealthy countries is aging due to falling birth rates and increased life expectancy. At the same time, the number of citizens with chronic conditions associated with ageing and/or unhealthy lifestyles, such as heart and cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, pulmonary diseases and asthma, has reached epidemic proportions.

Improving chronic patients' condition and lives will be the major challenge in the future as more and more patients develop chronic and lifestyle related diseases. Studies have consistently shown that when patients are more involved in their own healthcare, they are in many cases able to avoid severe lifestyle related chronic conditions. If they have developed a condition, a more efficient management of their chronic disease with the use of intelligent monitoring will improve patients' lives and at the same time enable the providers to meet this challenge.

People at risk need to be supported by ICT platforms and technologies that identify evolving patterns and early trends in their health and lifestyle parameters, which could indicate elevated risks of developing diseases or reveal episodes. Prevention systems must be able to empower the necessary involvement of healthcare professionals, facilitate personalised guidance, encourage citizen compliance or prompt for early medical intervention.

The emerging situation calls for a change in the way healthcare is delivered and the way medical knowledge is managed and transferred to tomorrow's clinical practice. ICT platforms and technologies may offer useful capability to open new opportunities in health and disease management, improve illness prevention, facilitate chronic disease management through active participation of patients and enable personalisation of care that contribute to improving the productivity of healthcare provisioning.

1. Novel diagnostic and monitoring tools, ICT platforms and technologies, non-invasive or minimally invasive sensors, suitable for self-monitoring and closed-loop management of chronic diseases and for enabling continuity of care through a wider interaction between care-takers and care-givers.
2. Automatic computerized decision support systems that could:
   
   • Assist healthcare professionals in hospital wards (e.g. improve glycaemic control of patients with diabetes).
   • Help patients to better understand and self-manage their disease and minimize the risks of complications (e.g. insulin-dependent type 1 diabetic patients outside from care premises).
3. Telemedicine technologies for the immediate and effective intervention for isolated rural areas that lack immediate access to primary health care.
4. Provide people with special needs with means to profile their habits, enabling monitoring of their health condition outside traditional healthcare environments and taking advantage of home automation integration and environmental monitoring.
5. Supplying medical care providers and health professionals with more comprehensive formalized knowledge and monitoring data for a better understanding of remote users' social/physical conditions and diagnostics.

• Remote diagnosis and patient management
• Wearable, outdoor and home based applications
• Patient monitoring in diverse environments (hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living)
• Wireless access in ubiquitous systems
• Decision support algorithms for sensor analysis
• Mobile access to decision support services for healthcare professionals
• Secure and high quality wireless networks in healthcare
• Mobile devices for patient monitoring
• Ad hoc wireless networks for enhanced monitoring
• Home and rural environments
• Wireless and wearable devices for pervasive healthcare
• Mobile and wireless technologies for healthcare delivery
• Service-oriented middleware architecture for medical device connectivity in personal health monitoring applications

Submission Instructions

Papers should be submitted to OpenConf by 30 June 2011, by selecting the special session link in the "Topic Area" list.

The preferred length for initial submissions is 4 pages, however the length of final papers should not exceed 8 pages including all figures, tables and references. Extra pages will incur additional charges. The papers must be submitted in PDF format. All papers will be reviewed. All submissions will be peer-reviewed, and acceptances will be provided by 15 July 2011.

Chairs

Short Bio

Dr. Ing. Franco Chiarugi received his degree, magna cum laude, in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa in 1983 and in the same year he got the qualification to practice as an engineer. He has been working in the field of biomedical engineering for more than 20 years (in industries and research centres) with special focus to communication protocols, biosignal processing, clinical decision support systems, and implementation and development of interoperability standards in the health domain. In 1999, he joined the Computational Medicine Laboratory (CML) at Forth-ICS, working on teleconsultation systems, homecare platforms, emergency care and clinical information systems. Dr. Ing. Chiarugi has contributed to several IST R&D projects like PICNIC, OpenECG, TWISTER and HEALTHWARE. He was FORTH's scientific responsible for the HEARTFAID IST FP6 STREP project (a platform for the management of heart failure patient) and is currently FORTH's scientific responsible for the REACTION IST FP7 IP project (a platform for the management of diabetic patient). He has published more than 70 papers in international journals and conference proceedings related to his fields of expertise.

Short Bio

Dr. Emmanouil G. Spanakis is a research affiliated fellow at the Institute of Computer Science at the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas. He holds a B.Sc. and a M.Sc. in Computer Science and he received his Ph.D degree in Computer Science in 2009 from the University of Crete, Heraklion, Greece. Since 1998, he has been a member of the Telecommunications and Networks Laboratory and the Computational Medicine Laboratory (CML) at Forth-ICS as a research intern in many collaborative R&D projects in the area of wireless communication networks, wireless ad hoc networks and ambient intelligence e-health environments. He has expertise and specialisation on issues of the wider scientific domain of wireless communication networks and computational medicine, and in particular on cross layer design in wireless ad-hoc networks, wireless interference channel under SINR constrains, performance and analysis of mobile ad-hoc routing protocols, wireless network measurements analysis as well as in biomedical informatics, wireless medical sensors and ambient e-health and m-health related services.

Contacts