m-Health Special Session

Chair: Chady El-Moucary, celmoucary@ndu.edu.lb

The ubiquitous influence and extensive usage of mobile phones accompanied with powerful, versatile and multipurpose applications every second, in addition to the widespread, availability/coverage, and affordability of wireless internet and/or mobile communications worldwide as well as the ongoing growth and development of computational capacities in terms of processing, storage, and multimedia are three dominant decisive factors behind the appearance of new techniques and practices in medicine announcing the dawn of new eras such as telemedicine, e-Health and m-Health. According to the International Telecommunication Union (ITU), there are more than five billion wireless subscribers. Moreover, reports from the GSM Association state that wireless signals now subtend over 85% of the world’s population, reaching far beyond the stretch of the electrical grid.

Mobile health or shortly m-Health describes the practice of medicine and public health via the support of mobile devices, patient monitoring devices, personal digital assistants, and other wireless devices. It has bifurcated as a class of e-Health which stipulates the use of information and communication technology (ICT) for health services and information. m-Health applications include the use of mobile devices in collecting community and clinical health data, delivery of healthcare information to practitioners, researchers, and patients, real-time monitoring of patient vital signs, and direct provision of care (via mobile telemedicine). Nonetheless, e-health would still be considered as the mainstay of m-Health applications by offering the technological platform used by m-Health to provide the access throughout the mobile scaffold.

Vital and crucial issues and challenges for m-Health derives from the groundwork required for measuring m-Health and which is founded on the possibility of programs evaluation; there is a need for reliable proofs and substantiation on which all stakeholders such as policy-makers, officials, and all kind of medical staff can validate their decisions in order to assess efficiency and benefits of m-Health.

The goals and objectives of this special session is to shed the light on the those innovations and challenges in this promising field and to gather researchers, practitioners, policy-makers, administrators, patients and other stakeholders into a scientific venue allowing for exchange of expertise and information related to the aforementioned categories of m-Health.

Potential Tracks:

ICT Support System; Mobile Apps; Public Health Surveillance; Patient Records; Policies; Data Collection and Surveys; Patient Monitoring; Web Application; Privacy and Security