MobileHealth 2018 : The 8th ACM MobiHoc 2018 Workshop on Pervasive Wireless Healthcare

Health cost represents a considerable ratio in the economic budget of developed countries, and certain tendency studies are not optimistic about an improvement in the situation. Average age of the population tends to increase and the number of people requiring more or less care intensive medical monitoring is not small. This increases overall cost of medical care. No doubt, using socio-medical establishments to place people at risk under surveillance is impractical for cost reasons, but also for reasons of quality of life. Many of these people are fully autonomous, though weakened. Their psychological confinement due to the presence of nursing staff would be a breach of their freedom. Therefore, partially replacing the assistance of nursing staff by small health surveillance and communication equipment like sensors, networks, monitoring software could be cost effective and would increase life standard. The objective is to develop and implement innovative solutions based on information technologies and wireless communication for the benefit of those needing medical permanence. Recent Advances in technology has led to the development of small, intelligent, wearable sensors capable of remotely performing critical health monitoring tasks and then transmitting patient’s data back to health care centres over wireless medium. Such wireless health monitoring platforms aim to continuously monitor mobile patients needing permanent surveillance. Patients benefit from continuous ambulatory monitoring as a part of a diagnostic procedure, optimal maintenance of a chronic condition or during supervised recovery from an acute event or surgical procedure.

However, to set up such platforms several issues along the communication chain should be resolved. The acquisition of medical information via a set of wireless sensors embedded in the patient himself, the treatment and use of this information either by a local contractor equipment or offset after transfer in 3G/4G/5G and/or WiFi/HEW connection to a data server, the access to the collected data, …etc. are some of the important challenges that we have to consider. Each level represents a complex subsystem with a local hierarchy employed to ensure efficiency, portability, security, and reduced cost.

MobileHealth workshop aims to provide a forum for the interaction of these multiple areas as an important chance to discuss and understand what aspects have to be considered to provide effective pervasive wireless healthcare systems. The theme of the 2018 edition of MobileHealth is Improving the Smart Cities Citizens Healthcare.

Learn more on the MobileHealth's website