Special Issue on
With the advent of these new e-Health applications and their associated requirements and constraints, many vital topics of research need to be explored to provide robustness, security, responsiveness, and longevity of the wireless network and patient health information. This special issue focuses on the state-of-the-art in wireless networking for e-Health applications, associated technical and regulatory challenges, as well as exploring deployments and implementations in real-world applications.
Purpose and Significance
Developments in component miniaturization of electronics and sensing devices, advances in low-power wireless communication, and the arrival of energy harvesting have led to the development of ultra-low power wireless communication and sensing devices that are ideally suited for mobile healthcare applications. These devices can be installed in medical facilities and equipment, or worn directly on a patient's body, allowing for real-time data acquisition, data fusion, reporting, and alerting from a plethora of sources. This allows for an unprecedented level of insight into a patient's health, with a similarly high level of fidelity of the collected data that in many cases is sufficient to allow biometric identification of an individual.
As a result, significant precautions are needed to protect the collected information, both during their transmission as well for storage. The security of individual wireless devices and applications from malicious access is also vitally important, in order to prevent information falsification and impersonation with potentially fatal results. Furthermore, different countries have varying regulatory requirements for e-Health devices and application that need to be carefully studied and implemented, but that also need to be explored for their potential ramifications for open research challenges and future trends. This is also reflected in the need to explore actual implementations, products, and real-world experiences of design, implementation, and operation of e-Health-enabled environments.
With a technology that can have such a literally vital impact on our lives, there are inevitably a plethora of challenges and opportunities that need to be explored. Providing an overview and insight into current developments and future trends of systems, protocols, and applications is the goal of this special issue.
Publications related to the proposed special issue include Liebert's open-acccess journal "Telemedicine and e-Health" (impact factor 1.297), the open-access "Journal of Medical Internet Research" (impact factor 4.7), and IGI-Global's "International Journal of E-Health and Medical Communications". While related, they are also much broader in scope, with a much more limited exploration of the areas of Wireless Sensor Networks and Wireless Body Area Networks compared to the proposed special issue. With the rapid advances in this field there is a great demand for research publications aimed specifically at WSN and WBAN in e-Health. This makes the proposed SI both timely and of great interest to a wide potential reader base.
The topics of interest for this special issue include, but are not limited to:
Michael Hempel
Associate Director, Advanced Telecommunications Engineering Laboratory
University of Nebraska — Lincoln, USA
email: mhempel2@unl.edu
Bernd Blobel
Director, eHealth Competence Center
University of Regensburg Medical Center, Germany
email: bernd.blobel@klinik.uni-regensburg.de
Thomas Michael Bohnert
Director, ICCLab
Zurich University of Applied Sciences, Switzerland
email: thomas.bohnert@zhaw.ch
Ali Khoynezhad
Director, Thoracic Aortic Surgery
Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA, USA
email: ali.khoynezhad@cshs.org
Manuscript Submission
Authors are invited to submit original scientific articles for review. Only original papers that have not been published or submitted for publication elsewhere will be considered. Papers should be tutorial in nature to help non-expert readers gain a good understanding of the topic. The papers should also discuss recent advances and future research topics. Authors must follow the IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine guidelines for preparation of the manuscript. For further details, please refer to "Submission Guidelines" in IEEE Wireless Communications Magazine website at: http://www.comsoc.org/wirelessmag/paper-submission-guidelines.
Proposed Schedule
Manuscripts submission deadline: extended to February 1, 2013
Acceptance Notification: April 1, 2013
Final manuscripts due: July 1, 2013
Publication Date: August, 2013