Main sponsor:

Imagining the future of healthcare and well-being

What visions and images of the future do we have, what are they based on, and what is their impact on todays decisions? We would like contributors to present scenarios and future studies on healthcare, studies on science fiction stories with medical and biotechnological themes, insights on the role and representations of healthcare and medicine in entertainment and marketing, and views on the role of art and design in creating future visions.

We would also like to address issues concerning the ethics and philosophy of future medicine and healthcare, such as developments in stem-cell research, biomedical engineering, dehumanization of services, cyborgs, e-Homo, cloning, and legal issues related to personal information and privacy.

Innovations within telemedicine and eHealth

Presentations on emerging technologies, new services, products, and ideas within telemedicine and eHealth. We invite contributors to present developments, cutting edge technologies, designs and research done in the field of electronic patient records, medical multimedia information, biometrics, digital and genetic profiles and bioinformatics, on- and in-body monitoring, intelligent health environments, smart materials, wearable computing, virtual reality, multimodal and tangible interfaces, avatar GUIs, robotics, nanotechnology and their potential applications within telemedicine and eHealth services.

Social interactions and effects, new paradigms, and possible implications of new technologies are also within the scope of this topic.

Healthcare politics and strategies for the future

We would like to learn about the impact of politics and business views on strategies and action plans on healthcare systems. We would like to address problems such as evolving roles of national, regional and local government, healthcare reforms, from government to governance, and new public management, making sense of information technology in organizations, centralizing vs. decentralizing, efficiency-quality, cost control, cost-benefit balance, preparing for the elder boom, e-Inclusion, adaptations to local needs, low-tech/high impact, high-tech/real impact, and sustainability,

Cross-border issues such as professionalism, culture and religion, standardization, collaboration, interoperability, and legal aspects will also be of interest.

Facing threats and disasters

Anticipation of and preparedness for environmental disasters, pandemic diseases, war and terrorism, refugees, conflict areas and healthcare delivery are all strong drivers determining many research areas, strategies and topics.
We are interested in presenting contributions on developed and planned telemedicine and eHealth services and products for prevention, treatment and other (action) plans which have their rational motives in such issues. We do also like to learn about how telemedicine and eHealth can contribute in humanitarian aid, with focus on potential applications and development areas. Furthermore are actual results, recommendations and possible transfer value to other (healthcare) areas of great interest.

Case studies and methods used

We would like contributions on experiences and results from exploring, analysing, demonstrating, and implementing telemedicine and eHealth, by means of case studies. We welcome insights into various research domains and the use of different methods and development models or tools, including presentations about Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), visual ethnography, observation, interviews, environmental scanning, scenario building, Delphi studies, role plays, simulations, UML (Unified Modeling Language), etc.