JCSE, vol. 5, no. 3, pp.236-236, September, 2011

DOI:

Preface for the Special Issue on uHealthcare

Sungyoung Lee, Chris Nugent, Lionel M. Ni
Kyung Hee University, Korea/ University of Ulster, UK/ The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong

Abstract: Over recent years trends in the increasing numbers of the older population have been witnessed. During this period there has been a paradigm shift in ubiquitous Healthcare (uHealthcare) research with the focus moving from one of health recovery to one now focused on the enhancement of wellness and health quality. The primary target cohort of this research has been older persons suffering from long term chronic conditions. Although a number of uHealthcare solutions have been designed and deployed there is still an opportunity for their improvement. The broader concept of Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) is an opportunistic framework within which uHealthcare systems have the potential to be deployed. AAL, in general terms, relates to intelligent systems which provide assistance in offering improved, healthier and a safer life in the preferred living environment for the older population. The core components of an AAL system include products, systems and services all of which aim to improve the quality of human life. The purpose of organizing this Special Issue in uHealthcare has been to provide a consolidated forum to introduce the prospects and importance of new information and communication technologies applicable to uHealthcare, with special emphasize on AAL technologies. All submitted articles have been reviewed by at least three reviewers. Four papers were finally accepted for this special issue, based on the reviewers’ recommendations. The papers address various topics for uHealthcare systems such as the concepts of AAL, the development of wearable intelligent systems and systematic architectures of personal tele-health systems. The first paper of this special issue, entitled “Managing sensor data in ambient assisted living”, presents an overview of the heterogeneous nature of sensor data within AAL based applications along with the challenges associated with its processing. Through the presentation of two case studies a number of frameworks have been presented which demonstrate the benefits of combining multiple sources of information. The focus of the second paper, entitled “Wearable intelligent systems for e-health (WISE)”, is on presenting the details of the development of a novel wearable intelligent system and its application for eHealth systems. A detailed assessment of the technical components, and development challenges in addition to new application areas is presented in the paper. The third paper of this special issue, entitled “A survey of transfer learning and multitask learning in bioinformatics and ehealth”, presents the recent developments in transfer learning and multitask learning technologies which can enable AAL for the purposes of eHealth systems. The fourth and final paper of this special issue, entitled “STEPSTONE: intelligent integration architecture for personal tele-health”, introduces the STEPSTONE project. This work aims to present the details of an open source technology which has the ability to support the scalable integration of healthcare devices. A number of applications demons

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