Pervasive Health Conference is a premier international forum with specific focus on technologies and human factors related to the use of ubiquitous computing in healthcare and for wellbeing. The overall goal of the Pervasive Health Conference is to take a multidisciplinary approach to Pervasive Healthcare Technology research and development. The Pervasive Healthcare Community is addressing a broad scope of research topics and concerns:

    identify and understand problems from a technological, social, medical, and legal as well as financial perspective (with a particular emphasis on understanding and supporting patients’ and practitioners’ needs);
     
    design, implementation, and evaluation of supporting hardware and software infrastructures, algorithms, services and applications; and
     
    organizational strategies that facilitate integration of Pervasive Healthcare Technology into the healthcare enterprise.

Traditional healthcare environments are extremely complex and challenging to manage, as they are required to cope with an assortment of patient conditions under various circumstances with a number of resource constraints. Pervasive healthcare technologies seek to respond to a variety of these pressures by successfully integrating them within existing healthcare environments. Technologies, standards and procedures on their own provide little and or no meaningful service. It is essential that pervasive healthcare environments, through a combined approach of data collection, data correlation and data presentation, assist healthcare professionals in delivering high levels of patient care, and empower individuals and their families for self-care and health management.

The Pervasive Healthcare Conference aims to gather technology experts, practitioners, industry and international authorities contributing towards the assessment, development and deployment of pervasive medical based technologies, standards and procedures.

Authors will be invited to submit their camera-ready papers in ACM format, to be published in ACM Digital Library and IEEE Xplore Digital Library. The acceptance rate was around 30% for Pervasive Health 2011, 2012, 2013, and 2014. Selected papers may be invited for publication in a special issue of the journal Methods of Information in Medicine. We welcome contributions from the following fields:

    Sensing/Actuating Technologies and Pervasive Computing
    Medicine, Nursing, and Allied Health Professions
    Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW)
    Hardware and Software Infrastructures

We seek novel, innovative, and exciting work in areas including but not limited to:

Pervasive Healthcare Management

    Challenges surrounding data quality
    Standards and interoperability in pervasive healthcare
    Business cases and cost issues
    Security and privacy issues
    Training of healthcare professional for pervasive healthcare
    Legal and regulatory issues
    Staffing and resource management

Understanding Users

    Identifying and addressing stakeholder needs
    Usability and acceptability
    Barriers and enablers to adoption
    Social implications of pervasive health technology, and social inclusion
    Coverage and delivery of pervasive healthcare services
    Patient and caregiver empowerment
    Diversity: population and condition-specific requirements
    Inclusive research and design: engaging underrepresented populations
    Digital interventions and health behavior change

Knowledge Representation and Reasoning

    Physiological models for interpreting medical sensor data
    Activity recognition and fall detection
    User modelling and personalization
    Modelling of Pervasive Healthcare environments
    Sensor-based decision support systems
    Design and evaluation of patient and ambient-related sensors
    Wearable and implantable sensor integration
    Data fusion in pervasive healthcare environments
    Data mining of medical patient records
    Software architectures
    Electronic Health Records           

Applications

    Autonomous systems to support independent living
    Clinical applications, validation and evaluation studies
    Telemedicine and mHealth solutions
    Chronic disease and health risk management applications
    Health/Wellbeing promotion and disease prevention
    Home based health and wellness measurement and monitoring
    Continuous vs event-driven monitoring of patients
    Smart homes and hospitals
    Using mobile devices in the storage, update, and transmission of patient data
    Wellbeing and lifestyle support
    Systems to support individuals with auditory, cognitive, or vision impairments
    Systems to support caregivers

Venue

Pervasive Health Conference 2015 will be conducted within the historical campus of Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey. Istanbul is the largest city of Turkey with its over 15 million inhabitants and one of the most significant cities in history since it has served as the capital of four great empires (Roman, Byzantine, Latin and Ottoman). The city was chosen as European Capital of Culture for 2010 and the European Capital of Sports for 2012. Istanbul is located both on the European and the Asian continents divided by the Bosphorus which is one of the world's busiest waterways. It is the only city in the world that bridges two continents. With its unique features, Istanbul is the commercial, historical and cultural center of Turkey and one of the world's most popular tourist destinations. Istanbul has two international airports. The larger one is Istanbul Atatürk which is located 24 km (15 mi) west of the city center and handles over 50 million passengers each year. Sabiha Gökçen International is located 45 km (28 mi) southeast of the city center and it has rapidly become popular among travelers since it is dominated by low-cost carriers.

Bogazici University is named after Bosphorus since the campus is located on a hill by the Bosphorus with an exceptional view. Since its establishment in 1863, the campus has attracted many students, researchers and visitors from all over the world making it a multicultural and lively environment.

Submissions

The conference invites the submission of original work in one or more of the following formats: full and short papers, workshops, posters, interactive demonstrations. Check the submission page for all submission details and templates. Pervasive Health 2015 will accept submissions in the following categories:

Full papers (up to 8 pages)

Full papers are submissions describing results and original research work not submitted or published elsewhere in one of the four main categories listed above. Full papers should properly place the work within the field, cite related work, and clearly indicate the innovative aspects of the work and its contribution to the field.

Short Papers (up to 4 pages)

Short papers are envisioned as submissions describing original research that is much more focused and smaller in scope than full research papers. Short papers are not expected to provide all the details on the research, but rather focus on the most innovative and salient aspects. In addition, short papers are not expected to include a comprehensive review of related work. Short papers will be presented during the main track of the conference.

Posters (up to 4 pages)

Poster category combines submissions reporting on the progress of ongoing research and insights into the lessons learned from current (industrial, practitioners, government, etc.) pervasive healthcare practice.

Medical Perspective Abstracts (1-2 pages)

Authors are invited to submit work in traditional medicine whose results are interesting to Pervasive Health audience. This track will give Pervasive Health attendees a way to learn about ongoing research initiatives, both in medicine and technology, and will provide presenters with an excellent opportunity to receive invaluable direct feedback from experts.

Demos (2 pages)

The demos track will showcase the latest developments and prototypes related to the topics of interest of the conference. The expected demo submissions should describe the technical details of the demo alongside its contribution to the healthcare domain.

Workshop proposals (2 pages)

Several workshops will be run in conjunction with the conference. The purpose of these workshops is to discuss work in progress and explore opportunities for new research related to pervasive healthcare. Innovative, high-risk frontier research ideas are particularly welcome as a main topic of a workshop.

Doctoral Colloquium (4 pages)

This full day event will enable doctoral students to present and reflect on their work alongside other doctoral students and a panel of experts. Submissions have to address the following questions:
1) What is the problem? What are you going to solve?
2) Who cares? Why should people care about this problem?
3) What have other people done about it? Literature review. Why is that not sufficient? What are the gaps and unanswered questions?
4) What are you going to do about it? Your approach
5) What are you really going to do about it? Methods, operationalization, sample
6) When do you know you are done?
7) What do you expect to find? What did you find? Results
8) What does this mean? Conclusions
9) Who cares? Implications
10) What would you like to know from the DC faculty panel?

Each paper will be blind, peer-reviewed by members of the Pervasive Health program committee with additional expert reviewers drawn from relevant research domains. Submissions will be evaluated based on their originality, significance of the contribution to the field, technical correctness and presentation. The paper should make explicit how the work offers unique and substantial contribution beyond what has already been published or submitted.

The Doctoral Colloquium papers will not be published to ensure the student's work is kept in confidence, however students will present their work in a presentation during the doctoral colloquium and via a poster in the main conference poster session.

Students are requested to provide a short letter from their advisor noting their year in the program, years until the student should defend, and how the DC will help with their research.