Communications Technologies and Infrastructures for Smart eHealth Systems

Guest editors

Sana Ullah, Polytechnic Institute of Porto, Porto, Portugal
Witold Pedrycz, University of Alberta, Alberta, Canada
George K. Karagiannidis, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece
Han-Chieh Chao, National Ilan University, Taiwan
Adam Gacek, Institute of Medical Technology and Equipment, Zabrze, Poland
Christos Verikoukis, Telecom. Technological Centre of Catalonia, Spain

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