This book provides readers with an integrative overview of the latest research and developments in the broad field of biomedical engineering. Each of the chapters offers a timely review written by leading biomedical engineers and aims at showing how the convergence of scientific and engineering fields with medicine has created a new basis for practically solving problems concerning human health, wellbeing and disease. While some of the latest frontiers of biomedicine, such as neuroscience and regenerative medicine, are becoming increasingly dependent on new ideas and tools from other disciplines, the paradigm shift caused by technological innovations in the fields of information science, nanotechnology, and robotics is opening new opportunities in healthcare, besides dramatically changing the ways we actually practice science. At the same time, a new generation of engineers, fluent in many different scientific "languages," is creating entirely new fields of research that approach the "old" questions from a new and holistic angle. The book reports on the scientific revolutions in the field of biomedicine by describing the latest technologies and findings developed at the interface between science and engineering. It addresses students, fellows, and faculty and industry investigators searching for new challenges in the broad biomedical engineering fields.

This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license. This book presents the VISCERAL project benchmarks for analysis and retrieval of 3D medical images (CT and MRI) on a large scale, which used an innovative cloud-based evaluation approach where the image data were stored centrally on a cloud infrastructure and participants placed their programs in virtual machines on the cloud. The book presents the points of view of both the organizers of the VISCERAL benchmarks and the participants. The book is divided into five parts. Part I presents the cloud-based benchmarking and Evaluation-as-a-Service paradigm that the VISCERAL benchmarks used. Part II focuses on the datasets of medical images annotated with ground truth created in VISCERAL that continue to be available for research. It also covers the practical aspects of obtaining permission to use medical data and manually annotating 3D medical images efficiently and effectively. The VISCERAL benchmarks are described in Part III, including a presentation and analysis of metrics used in evaluation of medical image analysis and search. Lastly, Parts IV and V present reports by some of the participants in the VISCERAL benchmarks, with Part IV devoted to the anatomy benchmarks and Part V to the retrieval benchmark. This book has two main audiences: the datasets as well as the segmentation and retrieval results are of most interest to medical imaging researchers, while eScience and computational science experts benefit from the insights into using the Evaluation-as-a-Service paradigm for evaluation and benchmarking on huge amounts of data.

This book examines the concept of dignity from a variety of global perspectives. It scrutinizes how dignity informs policy and practice, and is influenced by international and domestic law, human rights values, and domestic politics. An exciting collection of essays, this edited volume provides an analysis of human rights as they are experienced by real people who have in many cases been forced to take action to further their own interests. Readers will discover an extensive range of issues discussed, from the internet, climate change and disabilities, to globalization, old-age, and migrants' rights. The last section deals with the impact of various issues on indigenous and migrant populations, specifically violence in Columbia, border issues in Tijuana, women's and children's rights violations, and the complex problems experienced by refugees, particularly in regards to citizenship. The interdisciplinary nature of this work makes it an invaluable read for scholars of Health Studies, Law, Human Rights, Sociology and Politics.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Well-Being in the Information Society, WIS 2016, held in Tampere, Finland, in September 2016. The 21 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. With the core topic "Building Sustainable Health Ecosystems" WIS 2016 focused on innovations and fresh ideas in the cross-section of urban living, information society and health as understood in a wide sense. The papers presented in this volume are organized along the following seven broad topics: 1. Macro level considerations of e-health and welfare, 2.Welfare issues of children, youth, young elderly and seniors, 3. Analytics issues of eHealth and welfare, 4. National/regional initiatives in eHealth and welfare, and 5. Specific topics of eHealth. The papers in these topics span qualitative and quantitative analysis, empirical surveys, case studies as well as conceptual work.

This contributed volume draws a vital picture of the health care sector, which, like no other is affected by technology push and stakeholder pull. Innovative product and service solutions emerge, which have to integrate different stakeholders' interests. This book studies current challenges in health care management from different perspectives. Research articles analyze the situation in the health care sector and present solutions in the following areas: the health care system; hospitals; teams in health care; patients' perspectives; assessment of technologies and innovations; and toolkits for organizing health care. All these contributions summarize pressing hot topics in the health care sector, analyze their future potential, and derive managerial implications. Outstanding best practices throughout Europe are presented in the case study section of the book. Consequently, the book closes the gap between science and practical application by addressing not only readers from academia but also practitioners working in the health care industry.

This reference book shows how the Zero Outage method leads to more stability in operations, more reliability in projects and, ultimately, to greater customer satisfaction. It explains why clear standards for platforms, processes and personnel are essential for ensuring high ICT quality from end to end and what to look out for during changes - the most common cause of IT outages. Readers also learn how to resolve errors as quickly as possible and permanently eliminate them, and why industry-wide collaboration will only be possible with a shared standard of quality. This book is a practical introduction to making your ICT world even more failsafe and efficient. The authors share key knowledge in quality management and offer an exclusive insight into their extensively tested and continually enhanced formula for success: the Zero Outage approach.

This book discusses the latest findings towards ensuring people's safety, health, and welfare at work. It crosses different disciplines, such as work physiology, health informatics, workplace design, injury prevention, and occupational psychology. It presents new strategies for safety management, including accident prevention methods, such as performance testing and participatory ergonomics. The book, which is based on the AHFE 2016 International Conference on Safety Management and Human Factors, held on July 27-31, 2016, in Walt Disney World (R), Florida, USA, provides readers, including decision makers in government and public authorities, with a timely snapshot of the state of the art in the field of safety, health and welfare management. It also addresses agencies such as OSHA and NIOSH as well as other professionals dealing with occupational safety and health.

ITiB'2016 is the 5th Conference on Information Technologies in Biomedicine organized by the Department of Informatics & Medical Equipment of Silesian University of Technology every other year. The Conference is under the auspices of the Committee on Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The meeting has become a recognized event that helps to bridge the gap between methodological achievements in engineering and clinical requirements in medical diagnosis, therapy, and rehabilitation. Mathematical information analysis, computer applications together with medical equipment and instruments have become standard tools underpinning the current rapid progress with developing Computational Intelligence. Members of academic societies of technical and medical background present their research results and clinical implementations. This proceedings (divided in 2 volumes) include the following sections: O Image Processing O Signal Processing O Medical Information System & Database O Ambient Assisted Living O Bioinformatics O Modeling & Simulation O Biomechatronics O Biomaterials

ITiB'2016 is the 5th Conference on Information Technologies in Biomedicine organized by the Department of Informatics & Medical Equipment of Silesian University of Technology every other year. The Conference is under the auspices of the Committee on Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering of the Polish Academy of Sciences. The meeting has become a recognized event that helps to bridge the gap between methodological achievements in engineering and clinical requirements in medical diagnosis, therapy, and rehabilitation. Mathematical information analysis, computer applications together with medical equipment and instruments have become standard tools underpinning the current rapid progress with developing Computational Intelligence. Members of academic societies of technical and medical background present their research results and clinical implementations. This proceedings (divided in 2 volumes) include the following sections: O Image Processing O Signal Processing O Medical Information System & Database O Ambient Assisted Living O Bioinformatics O Modeling & Simulation O Biomechatronics O Biomaterials

This book describes how the creation of new digital services-through vertical and horizontal integration of data coming from sensors on top of existing legacy systems-that has already had a major impact on industry is now extending to healthcare. The book describes the fourth industrial revolution (i.e. Health 4.0), which is based on virtualization and service aggregation. It shows how sensors, embedded systems, and cyber-physical systems are fundamentally changing the way industrial processes work, their business models, and how we consume, while also affecting the health and care domains. Chapters describe the technology behind the shift of point of care to point of need and away from hospitals and institutions; how care will be delivered virtually outside hospitals; that services will be tailored to individuals rather than being designed as statistical averages; that data analytics will be used to help patients to manage their chronic conditions with help of smart devices; and that pharmaceuticals will be interactive to help prevent adverse reactions. The topics presented will have an impact on a variety of healthcare stakeholders in a continuously global and hyper-connected world. * Presents explanations of emerging topics as they relate to e-health, such as Industry 4.0, Precision Medicine, Mobile Health, 5G, Big Data, and Cyber-physical systems; * Provides overviews of technologies in addition to possible application scenarios and market conditions; * Features comprehensive demographic and statistic coverage of Health 4.0 presented in a graphical manner.

Assistive Technology Design for Intelligence Augmentation presents a series of frameworks, perspectives, and design guidelines drawn from disciplines spanning urban design, artificial intelligence, sociology, and new forms of collaborative work, as well as the author's experience in designing systems for people with cognitive disabilities. Many of the topics explored came from the author's graduate studies at the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design, part of the Department of Computer Science and the Institute of Cognitive Science at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The members of the Center for LifeLong Learning and Design came from a wide range of design perspectives including computer science, molecular biology, journalism, architecture, assistive technology (AT), urban design, sociology, and psychology. The main emphasis of this book is to provide leverage for understanding the problems that the AT designer faces rather than facilitating the design process itself. Looking at the designer's task with these lenses often changes the nature of the problem to be solved. The main body of this book consists of a series of short chapters describing a particular approach, its applicability and relevance to design for intelligence augmentation in complex computationally supported systems, and examples in research and the marketplace. The final part of the book consists of listing source documents for each of the topics and a reading list for further exploration. This book provides an introduction to perspectives and frameworks that are not commonly taught in presentations of AT design which may also provide valuable design insights to general human-computer interaction and computer-supported cooperative work researchers and practitioners.

This book introduces ongoing reflections within the research community on established information systems development topics and emerging concepts, approaches and ideas in the field of healthcare information systems. By promoting research on theoretical and methodological issues related to both information systems development in general and healthcare information systems in particular, it presents current research in order to promote improved practice. It comprises a selection of the best papers presented at the 24th International Conference on Information Systems Development (ISD) held in Harbin, China, August 25 - 27, 2015.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Paradigms for Mental Health, MindCare 2015, held in Milan, Italy, in September 2015. The 23 full papers and 6 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 40 submissions. The papers deal with the use of technologies in favor of maintaining and improving mental wellbeing. They focus on building new computing paradigms and on addressing a multitude of challenges in mental healthcare, for example in psychiatric and psychological domains with emphasis on new technologies, such as video and audio technologies and mobile and wearable computing.

Within the context of healthcare, there has been a long-standing interest in understanding the posture and movement of the human body. Gait analysis work over the years has looked to articulate the patterns and parameters of this movement both for a normal healthy body and in a range of movement-based disorders. In recent years, these efforts to understand the moving body have been transformed by significant advances in sensing technologies and computational analysis techniques all offering new ways for the moving body to be tracked, measured, and interpreted. While much of this work has been largely research focused, as the field matures, we are seeing more shifts into clinical practice. As a consequence, there is an increasing need to understand these sensing technologies over and above the specific capabilities to track, measure, and infer patterns of movement in themselves. Rather, there is an imperative to understand how the material form of these technologies enables them also to be situated in everyday healthcare contexts and practices. There are significant mutually interdependent ties between the fundamental characteristics and assumptions of these technologies and the configurations of everyday collaborative practices that are possible them. Our attention then must look to social, clinical, and technical relations pertaining to these various body technologies that may play out in particular ways across a range of different healthcare contexts and stakeholders. Our aim in this book is to explore these issues with key examples illustrating how social contexts of use relate to the properties and assumptions bound up in particular choices of body-tracking technology. We do this through a focus on three core application areas in healthcare-assessment, rehabilitation, and surgical interaction-and recent efforts to apply body-tracking technologies to them.

This book attempts to create awareness about the UN-MDGs and how various ICT can be harnessed to appeal to different demographics. Current empirical evidence suggests that MDG awareness is relatively low particularly in developed countries, and that the levels of MDG awareness vary considerable across socioeconomic variables or demographics from United Nations perspective. It also examines how ICT can be used to bring about technical and social innovations strengthen livelihoods, support economic development, water and climate resilience and improve the education and health sectors and enhance development opportunities. Several studies are highlighted that reinforce the view that government support and private sector expertise and funding are important factors in ICT-based e-government solutions in developing countries. The book also builds on the thesis that a strong connection between competencies in mathematics, science, and information communication/technology is required to build logical concepts and critical thinking skills. It also examines the opportunities and barriers of promoting students' learning skills, including communication, cooperation, collaboration and connection using the Wiki tool under the blackboard platform. Finally, the book also highlights the challenges involved in application of ICT in education. This is significant for educators in order to surmount these obstacles and consequently successfully incorporate ICT into the educational system. The chapters present the relevant literature on ICTs and the perceived barriers to ICT integration in basic education. They also focus on the implications of incorporating ICT in the basic educational system. The challenges confronting the integration of ICT in education are equally identified with a view to ensuring a more efficient application of ICT in attaining education for all.

Approximately 10% of North Americans have some communication disorder. These can be physical as in cerebral palsy and Parkinson's disease, cognitive as in Alzheimer's disease and dementia generally, or both physical and cognitive as in stroke. In fact, deteriorations in language are often the early hallmarks of broader diseases associated with older age, which is especially relevant since aging populations across many nations will result in a drastic increase in the prevalence of these types of disorders. A significant change to how healthcare is administered, brought on by these aging populations, will increase the workload of speech-language pathologists, therapists, and caregivers who are often already overloaded. Fortunately, modern speech technology, such as automatic speech recognition, has matured to the point where it can now have a profound positive impact on the lives of millions of people living with various types of disorders. This book serves as a common ground for two communities: clinical linguists (e.g., speech-language pathologists) and technologists (e.g., computer scientists). This book examines the neurological and physical causes of several speech disorders and their clinical effects, and demonstrates how modern technology can be used in practice to manage those effects and improve one's quality of life. This book is intended for a broad audience, from undergraduates to more senior researchers, as well as to users of these technologies and their therapists.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 8th International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies, BIOSTEC 2015, held in Lisbon, Portugal, in January 2015. The 27 revised full papers presented together with an invited paper were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 375 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics and are organized in four general topical sections on biomedical electronics and devices; bioimaging; bioinformatics models, methods and algorithms; bio-inspired systems and signal processing; health informatics.

This book constitutes the proceedings of the First International Conference on Future Access Enablers for Ubiquitous and Intelligent Infrastructures, FABULOUS 2015, held in Ohrid, Republic of Macedonia, in September 2015. The 39 revised papers cover the broad areas of future wireless networks, ambient and assisted living, smart infrastructures and security and reflect the fast developing and vibrant penetration of IoT technologies in diverse areas of human live.

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-workshop proceedings at PAKDD Workshops 2016, held in conjunction with PAKDD, the 20th Pacific-Asia Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining in Auckland, New Zealand, in April 2016. The 23 revised papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 38 submissions. The workshops affiliated with PAKDD 2016 include: Biologically Inspired Data Mining Techniques, BDM; Machine Learning for Sensory Data Analysis, MLSDA; Predictive Analytics for Critical Care, PACC; as well as Data Mining in Business and Finance, WDMBF.

In this volume, scientists and practitioners write about new methods and technologies for improving the operation of health care organizations. Statistical analyses play an important role in these methods with the implications of simulation and modeling applied to the future of health care. Papers are based on work presented at the Second International Conference on Health Care Systems Engineering (HCSE2015) in Lyon, France. The conference was a rare opportunity for scientists and practitioners to share work directly with each other. Each resulting paper received a double blind review. Paper topics include: hospital drug logistics, emergency care, simulation in patient care, and models for home care services.

This volumes presents the proceedings of ICIBEL 2015, organized by the Centre for Innovation in Medical Engineering (CIME) under Innovative Technology Research Cluster, University of Malaya. It was held in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, from 6-8 December 2015. The ICIBEL 2015 conference promotes the latest researches and developments related to the integration of the Engineering technology in medical fields and life sciences. This includes the latest innovations, research trends and concerns, challenges and adopted solution in the field of medical engineering and life sciences.

This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Exploring Service Science (IESS), held in Bucharest, Romania, in May 2016.Service science constitutes an interdisciplinary approach to systematic innovation in service systems, integrating managerial, social, legal, and engineering aspects to address the theoretical and practical challenges of the service industry and its economy. The 45 full papers and 13 short papers accepted for IESS were selected from 119 submissions. The papers consider the topics service exploration theories and processes; modeling service requirements and management of business processes; value co-creation through knowledge management and user-centric services; service design methodologies and patterns; service innovation and strategy; IT-based service engineering; servitization in sustainable manufacturing; product-service systems; business software services and data-driven service design; web service design and service-oriented agents; IoT and mobile apps for public transport service management; e-health services and medical data interoperability; and service and IT-oriented learning and education systems.

This book constitutes thoroughly revised and selected papers from the Second International Congress on Sports Science Research and Technology Support, icSPORTS 2014, held in Rome, Italy, in October 2014. The 8 thoroughly revised and extended papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from originally 131 submissions.

The two-volume set LNICST 150 and 151 constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the First International Internet of Things Summit, IoT360 2014, held in Rome, Italy, in October 2014. This volume contains 74 full papers carefully reviewed and selected from 118 submissions at the following four conferences: the First International Conference on Cognitive Internet of Things Technologies, COIOTE 2014; the First International Conference on Pervasive Games, PERGAMES 2014; the First International Conference on IoT Technologies for HealthCare, HealthyIoT 2014; and the First International Conference on IoT as a Service, IoTaaS 2014. The papers cover the following topics: user-centric IoT; artificial intelligence techniques for the IoT; the design and deployment of pervasive games for various sectors, such as health and wellbeing, ambient assisted living, smart cities and societies, education, cultural heritage, and tourism; delivery of electronic healthcare; patient care and medical data management; smart objects; networking considerations for IoT; platforms for IoTaaS; adapting to the IoT environment; modeling IoTaaS; machine to machine support in IoT.

This book provides a literature review of various wireless MAC protocols and techniques for achieving real-time and reliable communications in the context of cyber-physical systems (CPS). The evaluation analysis of IEEE 802.15.4 for CPS therein will give insights into configuration and optimization of critical design parameters of MAC protocols. In addition, this book also presents the design and evaluation of an adaptive MAC protocol for medical CPS, which exemplifies how to facilitate real-time and reliable communications in CPS by exploiting IEEE 802.15.4 based MAC protocols. This book will be of interest to researchers, practitioners, and students to better understand the QoS requirements of CPS, especially for healthcare applications.