[agents] special issue on eHealth

[Anis Koubaa (COINS)]

CALL FOR PAPERS

<Special Issue on ³Communications Technologies and Infrastructures for
Smart eHealth Systems² in IEEE Systems Journal>

SCOPE

Research advances in healthcare domain have facilitated the integration of
different technologies for smart, cost-effective, reliable, and pervasive
health monitoring of chronic diseases - which have affected around one
billion people worldwide. Current research efforts focus on developing
real-time communication methods, mostly for Body Area Networks (BANs) that
are used to deliver patients´ information effectively. These efforts are
limited to communication within a BAN, however less attention has been
given to connect multiple BANs to remote servers in real-time. In
addition, there is a limited study on the integration of BANs with
different technologies including mobile cloud computing - a technology
that may assist in storing and processing the huge amount of BAN data at
competitive costs. Machine to Machine (M2M) is also considered to be a
valuable tool in delivering BAN data to a remote server/cloud for further
analysis. This may assist in reducing risks and cost of remote health
monitoring. Unlike conventional research in BANs where researchers focused
on individual networks, there is a need to develop innovative
communication methods with a focus on complete and smart eHealth systems.
This smart eHealth system must integrate the aforementioned technologies
with multiple BANs, and provide rich healthcare services to end users. It
calls for research on versatile topics ranging from Physical (PHY) and
Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols to BANs coexistence, traffic
characterization, cloud resource allocation, and cloud monitoring and
maintenance.
This special issue will focus on novel communication methods for smart
eHealth systems, by identifying new perspectives and highlight potential
research issues and challenges. Specifically, this special issue will
demonstrate how the emerging technologies including cloud computing and/or
M2M could be used in future healthcare systems. Original review and survey
articles will be considered as well. The topics of interest include, but
are not limited to:

-    M2M communication methods
-    Energy-efficient PHY/MAC and networking protocols
-    BANs and mobile cloud computing
-    Cloud resource allocation and monitoring
-    Wearable and implantable computing
-    IoT for smart eHealth systems
-    Fault tolerance, reliability and scalability
-    Traffic characterization
-    Coexistence issues of multiple BANs
-    Security and privacy
-    QoS issues in BANs/cloud computing
-    Experimental and simulation-based methods
-    Case studies of smart eHealth architectures

Papers should address the above specific topics from the system
perspective and in the context of eHealth systems in order to be
considered for this special issue.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES
Authors are invited to submit original research contributions by following
the detailed instructions given in the ³Information for Authors² at
http://www.ieeesystemsjournal.org. In the cover letter, authors should
explicitly state that the paper is submitted to the ³Special Issue on
Communication Technologies and Infrastructures for Smart eHealth Systems².
Questions about the special issue should be directed to the Guest Editors.
SCHEDULE

Paper submission deadline:     Jan. 15, 2015
Notification of the first review:     Apr. 15, 2015
Revised paper submission:     May 30, 2015
Notification of the re-review:     July 30, 2015
Minor revision deadline:     Aug 30, 2015
Final notification:     Sept 20, 2015
Final manuscript:     Oct 10, 2015
Publication:     by advance posting in IEEE xplore as soon as authors
approve galley proofs
Expected printing:     Second half of 2016

GUEST EDITORS
Sana Ullah, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Porto, Portugal,
sanajcs at hotmail.com Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta, Alberta,
Canada, wpedrycz at ualberta.ca George K. Karagiannidis, Aristotle University
of Thessaloniki, Greece, geokarag at auth.gr Han-Chieh Chao, National Ilan
University, Taiwan, hcchao at gmail.com Adam Gacek, Institute of Medical
Technology and Equipment, Zabrze, Poland, adamg at itam.zabrze.pl Christos
Verikoukis, Telecom. Technological Centre of Catalonia, Spain,
cveri at cttc.es