Scope
The latest demographic changes worldwide and advances in information and communication technologies have motivated the development of healthcare systems moving the point of care closer to the patients allowing them more active involvement. To guarantee maximum health benefits to patients, and reduce the amount of effort and costs for the care givers, these systems should be smarter than the former telemedicine solutions lacking support for individualised disease management due to the intrinsic complexity and uncertainty in the medical domain.Here smart implies that the system is capable of interpreting information within context, which can be broadly considered as patient-, disease-, or environment-specific, and attempts to solve problems at a level equivalent to or even better than human experts. The intelligence can be embedded in various ways, for example, by designing and implementing decision‐support models, which can run in a stand‐alone computing device such as a smartphone, by enabling system’s adaptation through user parameters, by embedding alerting modules into sensors or medical devices that can process measurements and warn of changes in a patient's condition.
Deploying such smart technologies is expected to highly support individualisation—an emerging dimension of healthcare—by providing services and solutions that are tailored to the individual's needs and preferences. Any development in this direction, of course, faces challenges and requires enhanced efforts with respect to knowledge acquisition and representation, secure and user-‐tailored system design, evaluation and affordable deployment.
The aim of this special track is to provide a dedicated platform specifically designed for computer scientists, clinical informaticists, researchers, engineers and practitioners to present and discuss their recent work and innovations in the interdisciplinary area of smart healthcare technologies for individualised healthcare, and to consider potential collaborations and future directions for development.