The convergence of the Internet of Things and Cloud for Smart Healthcare

With the development of smart sensorial media, things, and cloud technologies, “Smart healthcare” is getting remarkable consideration from the academia, the governments, the industry, and from the healthcare community. Recently, the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought the vision of a smarter world into reality with a massive amount of data and numerous services. Cloud computing fits well as an enabling technology in this scenario as it presents a flexible stack of computing, storage and software services at low cost. The cloud-based services can provide a high quality of experience to physicians, clinics, and other caregivers anytime and from anywhere seamlessly. However, the convergence of IoT and cloud can provide new opportunities for both technologies. The said IoT-cloud convergence can play a significant role in the smart healthcare by offering better insight of heterogeneous healthcare content (e.g., X-ray, ECG, MRI, ultrasound image, clinical notes, claims, and so on) to support affordable and quality patient care. It can also support powerful processing and storage facilities of huge IoT data streams (big data) beyond the capability of individual \”things,\” as well as to provide automated decision making in real-time. While researchers have been making advances to the study of IoT and cloud services individually, a very little attention has been given to develop cost-effective and affordable smart healthcare service. The IoT-Cloud convergence for smart healthcare has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our society; however, many technical challenges need to be addressed before this potential can be realized. Some of these challenges include: How to use the combined potential of IoT and cloud services or application for providing smart healthcare solutions? How these technologies can assist with right patient care at the right time and in the right place? How IoT-Cloud convergence along with healthcare big data analytics can facilitate healthcare data representation, storage, analysis and integration for effective smart healthcare solutions?

This special issue is intended to report high-quality research on recent advances toward IoT-Cloud convergence for smart healthcare, more specifically to the state-of-the-art approaches, methodologies and systems for the design, development, deployment and innovative use of those convergence technologies for providing insights into smart healthcare service demands. Authors are solicited to submit complete unpublished papers in the following topics. Topic includes but not restricted to:

• Innovative classification techniques, and test beds for IoT-cloud enable connected healthcare
• Enabling IoT-cloud convergence technologies for  Smart Health Care
• Big Data Analytics and Cognitive Computing for Smart Healthcare
• Energy-efficient Data Offloading and Computing over IoT-Clouds for Smart Healthcare
• Medical IoT and big data analytics for  Smart Health Care
• IoT-cloud for  human activity monitoring
• Context-aware Situation Understanding for Smart Health Care
• Deep Learning approaches for Smart Health Care
• Privacy and  security issues on IoT-cloud convergence of Smart Health Care
• Dynamic resource provisioning on IoT- cloud for mobile healthcare
• Techniques, algorithms and methods of processing smart health care data over the IoT-Cloud
• IoT-Cloud-supported Serious games or Exergames for Smart care

Submission Guidelines

Original, high-quality contributions that are not yet published or that are not currently under review by other journals or peer-reviewed conferences are sought. Papers will be peer-reviewed by independent reviewers and selected based on originality, scientific quality and relevance to this Special Issue. The journal editors will make final decisions about the acceptance of the papers.

Authors should prepare their manuscript according to the Guide for Authors available from the online submission page of the Future Generation Computer Systems at http://ees.elsevier.com/fgcs/. Authors should select SI “IoT-Cloud SmartHealthCare” when they reach the “Article Type” step in the submission process.

Important dates

• Paper submission due:  Nov  15, 2017
• First-round acceptance notification: Feb. 15, 2018
• Revision submission: March 15, 2018
• Notification of final decision: April 15, 2018
• Submission of final paper: May  15, 2018
• Publication date: 3rd quarter of 2018

Guest editors

M. Shamim Hossain (Leading Guest Editor)
King Saud University, KSA
mshossain@ksu.edu.sa

Josu Bilbao
IK4-IKERLAN, Spain
JBilbao@ikerlan.es

Changsheng Xu
Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), China
csxu@nlpr.ia.ac.cn

Manzur Murshed
Federation University Australia (Monash), Australia,
manzur.murshed@federation.edu.au

Stefan Goebel                                                                                                                                                   Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Technical University Darmstadt, Germany,
stefan.goebel@kom.tu-darmstadt.de