A "smart home" is a residential setting equipped with a set of advanced electronics, sensors and automated devices specifically designed for care delivery, remote monitoring, early detection of problems or emergency cases and promotion of residential safety and quality of life. Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are utilized to allow older adults to live independently in their preferred environment. Thus, systems are patient-centered rather than institution-centered as they are designed to address the needs of the elderly, their families and caregivers rather than these of health care facilities. Technology advances rapidly and it is an imperative for the informatics community to ensure that smart home applications are designed, implemented and evaluated properly addressing not only technical challenges but also the end usersÂ’ needs, ethical, clinical and policy issues and the design of sustainable and non-obtrusive interventions.
Objectives
This Special Topic Issue will focus on the wide spectrum of all relevant issues and provide a holistic examination of the current status and future trends in smart homes and ambient assisted living, and will bring together informatics experts, practitioners and designers from a wide range of domains including engineering, health services, gerontology, usability, biomedical engineering, human-computer interaction. Specifically, the proposed Special Topic Issue will focus on the following areas:
- design and development of technological home-based innovative solutions including sensor technologies, activity monitors, wearable technologies etc.
- Interoperability of smart home components
- development of algorithms and data mining techniques for reasoning, temporal modeling and detection of patterns, leading ultimately to decision making
- design of ICT based models that support aging in place
- analysis of ethical issues associated with technology integration in the residence and increased monitoring of residents
- design of financially sustainable models (including the design of cost-effectiveness studies for these technologies)
Submission Guidelines
High quality, original papers dealing with this domain are solicited. All the manuscripts submitted will be subject to a rigorous review process. Submissions of full papers should be limited to at most 4,000 words including figures, tables, and references. The papers must follow the submission guidelines of Methods of Information in Medicine (available at http://www.schattauer.de/fileadmin/assets/
zeitschriften/methods/instructions_to_authors_10_2006.pdf).
Papers must not have appeared in, nor be under consideration by other journals. The Special Topic Issue is anticipated to be published in 2008. Please submit your paper electronically (as an email attachment) to the Guest Editor at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Submission Deadline: May 1, 2007
For further information, please visit:
http://www.health-smarthomes.org