Highlights of IEEE HEALTHCOM 2013
By Joel Rodrigues
Prof. Joel Rodrigues provided this overview of HEALTHCOM 2013 in his opening remarks to the Conference. (NOTE: The Proceedings of the Conference will be published by IEEE. See IEEExplore for access to articles from this and previous Healthcom Conferences.)
On behalf of the entire IEEE HEALTHCOM 2013 team, I am pleased to welcome all of you to the 15th IEEE International Conference on e-Health Networking, Application and Services (IEEE HEALTHCOM 2013) on such a sunny day on this beautiful campus from the university of Lisbon, the beautiful capital of Portugal, at October 09-12, 2013.
IEEE HEALTHCOM is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society Technical Committee on eHealth. As a Steering Committee Chair of this conference and Vice-Chair of the eHealth TC, it is my great honor to organize our high-level conference in my country, Portugal. IEEE HEALTHCOM 2013 is fully sponsored by the IEEE Communications Society and technically sponsored by recognized institutions that I am pleased to mention as follows:
- University of Beira Interior, Portugal
- Instituto Superior de Ciências Sociais e Politicas, University of Lisbon
- Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal
- Next Generation Networks and Applications Research Group (IT-UBI)
- CTTC – Centre Tecnològic de Telecomunicacions de Catalunya, Spain
- CI2 – Centro de Investigação e Criatividade em Informática, Portugal
- and the Projects
- AAL4ALL – Ambient Assisted Living for All, an anchor project from the Health Cluster Portugal
- and WSN4QoL – Secure Location-Aware Cooperative Network-Coded WSNs for Better Quality of Life – an FP7 Project.
The conference offers an excellent program addressing the new frontiers of eHealth technologies and brings together experts from all over the world who come to Lisbon to share their expertise and new ideas. Thanks to our authors from the most diverse research areas including nurses, physicians, technologists, social scientists, lawyers, and other professionals. We received contributions from 51 countries and a total of 286 papers submitted for the main conference. The acceptation ratio is below 45%.
This year’s conference is a three and an half day program, featuring
- 20 Technical sessions and 2 poster Sessions
- 3 workshops
- International Workshop on New Trends on Telemedicine (NTT 2013)
- First International Workshop on Service Science for e-Health (SSH 2013)
- 1st International Workshop on Active and Healthy Ageing (AHA 2013)
- 4 tutorials
- Methodology for Evaluating Experience of Mobile (Healthcare) Applications Used in Different Contexts of Daily Life
- Health Care Collaborative Networked Organization
- Introduction to openEHR – Main Concepts, Tools and Archetype/Template Creation
- Designing an Information Accountability Framework for eHealth
- 4 Keynote Speeches
- The Challenge of Big Data in Health: Meaningful Use of Information for Patient Centered Care
- Disaster Communications after the Accidents of the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant (Japan)
- eHEALTH in Europe
- Transparent Robot-Assisted Gait Training in Neurorehabilitation
- 2 Panels
- Telemedicine Today!
- Cloud or not to Cloud for eHealth
- Several live Demos in a Demo Session
- Robotic surgeries
- Demos from the AAL4ALL project
- Tele-consulting
- A large industry Exhibition with key players on eHealth technologies
- A plenary session (next Saturday) addressing key topics related to eHealth, closing this conference with the presence of the Portuguese Minister of Health, Dr. Paulo Macedo.
The conference also promotes a social program including the Welcome Reception that took place by yesterday, lunches, Conference banquet, and offer participants the opportunity to visit the beautiful city of Lisbon and its surroundings.
It is my privilege to convey the community’s gratitude to the exhibitors and the conference patrons, namely,
- Our Gold Patron – Portugal Telecom
- Silver Patrons – Carestream and Siemens
- Bronze Patrons:
- ALTRAN
- ONI Telecom
- ORAMIX – Expert Services
- PROSIDE
- RIZI – Expert Software Solutions
- Session Patrons:
- Everis
- Linde Group
- Maxdata
- Bags Patron – HP
Contributor
Joel José P. C. Rodrigues (S’01, M’06, SM’06) is a professor in the Department of Informatics of the University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, and researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal. He received a PhD degree in informatics engineering from the University of Beira Interior. His main research interests include sensor networks, e-health, e-learning, vehicular delay-tolerant networks, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. Read more
Joel José P. C. Rodrigues (S'01, M'06, SM'06) is a professor in the Department of Informatics of the University of Beira Interior, Covilhã, Portugal, and researcher at the Instituto de Telecomunicações, Portugal. He received a PhD degree in informatics engineering from the University of Beira Interior. His main research interests include sensor networks, e-health, e-learning, vehicular delay-tolerant networks, and mobile and ubiquitous computing. 
Hsi-Pin Ma is an Associate Professor of Department of Electrical Engineering at National Tsing Hua University, Hsinchu, Taiwan. He received his Ph. D. from National Taiwan University, Taipei, Taiwan. His research interests include communications system design and SoC implementation, power efficient/energy efficient signal processing, and biomedical signal processing and system applications. 
Hung-Chih Chiu is a Ph. D. student in the National Tsing Hua University since 2011. His research interests include biomedical signal processing and Very-large-scale integration (VLSI). He received the master degree at National Central University in 2010. 
Yi-Lwun Ho MD. PhD., is an associate professor of Department of Internal Medicine and also an adjunct associate professor of Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, National Taiwan University (NTU) College of Medicine. He is a cardiologist and specialized in electro-physiologic studies of arrhythmia. One of his research emphases has been in telecare of cardiovascular diseases. He also used linear and non-linear analysis of heart rate variability to study the predictors of patients with heart failure. He is the Director of Heart Failure Center of NTU Hospital. He is also the Director of Tele-Health Center of NTU Hospital. 
Yen-Hung Lin MD, PhD is clinical assistant professor of Internal Medicine at National Taiwan University College of Medicine and attending physician of Department of Internal Medicine at National Taiwan University Hospital. Dr. Lin received his MD degree in School of Medicine, National Taiwan University and his PhD degree in Graduate Institute of Clinical Medicine, School of Medicine, National Taiwan University. His research interests focus on cardiac and vascular function and structure change in primary aldosteronism, and biomarkers in various cardiovascular disease, including hypertensive heart disease, coronary artery disease, and heart failure 
E. Kartsakli received her PhD in Wireless Telecommunications from the Technical University of Catalonia (BarcelonaTECH) She has participated in several national and European projects. Her research interests include wireless networking, channel access protocols and energy efficient communication protocols. 
Angelos Antonopoulos received his Ph.D. from Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). He is currently working as a Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Smart Energy Efficient Communication Technologies (SMARTECH) area of the Telecommunications Technological Centre of Catalonia (CTTC) and his main research interests include cooperative communications, MAC protocols, network coding and energy efficient network planning. 
Stefano Tennina received the Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Information Engineering from the University of L'Aquila, Italy. He is co-founder of WEST Aquila s.r.l. with the role of Senior Research Scientist. His research interests focus is in the area of wireless communication protocols/systems, with particular emphasis on experimentation activities in real working networks test-beds. 
Aris S. Lalos received the Ph.D. degree in signal processing for wireless communications from the Computer Engineering and Informatics Department (CEID), School of Engineering (SE), University of Patras (UoP), Rio-Patras, Greece. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at signal theory and communication department, Technical University of Catalonia, Barcelona, Spain. 
Prodromos-Vasileios Mekikis holds a Master of Science in System on Chip design from Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) He is currently pursuing a PhD degree at the Signal Theory and Communications department (TSC) of the Technical University of Catalonia (UPC). His main research interests include cooperative communications and large scale wireless sensor networks. 
Luis Alonso received the PhD from UPC (Barcelona) He is an Associate Professor at UPC. He is co-founder of the Wireless Communications and Technologies Research Group (WiComTec). His current research interests are within the field of medium access protocols, radio resource management, cross-layer optimization, cooperative transmissions, cognitive radio and QoS features for all kind of wireless communications systems. 
Fabio Graziosi received the Ph.D. degree in electronic engineering from the University of L'Aquila, Italy. He is the Chairman of the Board of Directors of WEST Aquila s.r.l.. He is also an Associate Professor at the University of L'Aquila, Italy. His current research interests are mainly focused on wireless communications systems with emphasis on wireless sensor networks. 
Marco Di Renzo received the Ph.D. degree from the University of L'Aquila, Italy. He received the H.D.R. degree from the University of Paris-Sud XI, France. He is a faculty member of the Laboratory of Signals and Systems, a joint laboratory of CNRS, SUPELEC and the University of Paris-Sud XI, France. 
Christos Verikoukis received his Ph.D. from the Technical University of Catalonia. He is currently the Head of the SMARTECH department at CTTC and he is an adjunct associate professor in the area of ICT for Healthcare at Barcelona University (UB).