Smart Healthcare Applications and Services: Developments and Practices

Within the last years a variety of new healthcare concepts for supporting and assisting users in technology-enhanced home environments emerged. These so-called “smart healthcare technologies” are characterized by a combined use of information and communication technologies and health monitoring devices in the home domain. Smart Healthcare Applications and Services: Developments and Practices provides an in-depth introduction into medical, social, psychological, and technical aspects of smart healthcare applications as well as their consequences for the design, use and acceptance of future systems. The knowledge and insights provided in this book will help students as well as systems designers understand the fundamental social and technical requirements smart healthcare technologies have to meet.

Carsten Röcker is a senior researcher at the Human Technology Centre (HumTec) at RWTH Aachen University, working in the research program "eHealth - Enhancing Mobility with Aging." As part of an interdisciplinary team of researchers he is designing healthcare applications for supporting elderly people in ubiquitous computing environments. Previously, Carsten was a visiting PostDoc at the Media Computing Group, focusing on the evaluation of user requirements for smart work environments. Before joining RWTH Aachen University in 2008, he was a PostDoc at the Distributed Cognition and HCI Laboratory at the University of California in San Diego. From 2000 to 2006 he worked as a research associate at the Fraunhofer Integrated Publication and Information Systems Institute (IPSI) in Darmstadt. During this time he was involved in several projects designing novel information and communication technologies for intelligent home and office environments. He has an interdisciplinary background with academic degrees in the areas computer science (PhD), psychology (PhD), electrical engineering (Master) and management (Master).

Martina Ziefle, Ph.D., is Professor for Communication Science at RWTH Aachen University, Germany and head of a research group at the Human Technology Centre (HumTec). HumTec is funded by the Excellence Initiative of the German federal and state governments and aims at fostering high level interdisciplinary research between the humanities/social sciences and the engineering/natural sciences. Prof. Ziefle's research addresses human factors in different technology types and using contexts, taking demands of user diversity into account. Her methodological competence regards the experimental and empirical evaluation of human computer interaction. A special research focus is directed to the usability and acceptance of mobile devices, which are increasingly used in novel contexts. Her main research concern is to shape technology innovation in ways that technology development is truly balanced with the human factor. In addition to teaching and directing research on campus, Prof. Ziefle leads various projects funded by industrial and public authorities, dealing with the interaction and communication of humans with technology.