Affect and Behaviour Related Assistance in Support for the Elderly

Affect and Behaviour Related Assistance . medical applications

27 May 2014, Rhodes, Greece

Workshop in the framework of the 7th International Conference on Pervasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments . PETRA

Workshop Theme

The ABRA workshop traditionally brings together scientists and technologists working on assistive technologies that relate to affective and behavioural aspects in daily life. Typical applications are in the home environment, with technologies for ambient assisted living or wellness technologies, aiming to help people leading healthy lives independently and on their own.

The seventh workshop in this series will add a focus on medical applications for both patients and medical staff alike. Modern technologies allow for a variety of pervasive personal assistance. A plethora of smartphone apps offer health information on the spot, consultancy on specific subjects, and assistance for several health-related activities. The development of ever smaller hardware makes possible dedicated gadgets to keep track of e.g. physical activity, sleep patterns and eating habits. In short, current technological developments open the door for very personalized health-related assistance.

However, most of the solutions currently available lack a scientific-medical background and often stick at a fairly shallow level of assistance. While some of them do a good job in motivating people for a healthier lifestyle, they have limited medical credibility. As for now, modern technologies have not made it into a GP's practice and are often even rejected from medical staff due to bad experiences with self-called medical apps the quality of which didn't live up to the high expectations of medical personnel and patients.

Call for Papers

With this workshop's focus on medical assistive applications we want to encourage developers and engineers to propose their ideas on truly assistive medical apps and devices. We also want to encourage medical experts to join us and introduce their visions and hopes but also concerns concerning modern technologies in the medical domain. Last but not least we invite companies to introduce their products and services and take advantage of the resulting fruitful discussions.

We particularly solicit contributions on the following subjects:

Submission

Submissions should be in ACM style format and will be accepted as either full paper (8 pages) or short paper (4 pages) using these Latex and MS Word templates. Please refer also to the conference web site for latest announcements. Submissions are to be done through the workshop's submissions page

For any questions please contact the workshop chairs.

Important Dates

Paper Submission Deadline: March 16, 2014
Paper Acceptance Notification: April 04, 2014
Camera Ready Paper Deadline: April 30, 2014
Workshop: May 27, 2014

Proceedings Information

Accepted papers will be presented at the workshop and published in the Proceedings of the PETRA 2014 Conference. ACM will be the publisher of these proceedings, which will be a volume in the ACM International Conference Proceedings Series in the ACM Digital Library.

Workshop Chairs

Christian Peter, BioArtProducts GmbH, Germany, c.peter[at]bioeng[dot]de
Gerald Bieber, Fraunhofer IGD Rostock, Germany, gery[at]igd-r[dot]fraunhofer[dot]de
Kostas Karpouzis, ICCS/NTUA Athens, Greece, kkarpou[at]cs[dot]ntua[dot]gr