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The International Workshop on “Personalised Health: The Integration of Innovative Sensing, Textiles, Information & Communication Technologies” organised in collaboration with the European Commission, took place in Belfast, Northern Ireland, 13–15th December 2004. At this unique event, addressing personalised health management systems, the workshop endeavoured to promote the synergies between research efforts in three diverse areas; sensor technologies, advanced textiles and nanotechnology and computing. This event followed the International Workshop on “New Generation of Wearable Systems for eHealth” held in Lucca, Italy 2003 and aimed to consolidate the recommendations from this with recent state-of-the-art findings in the evolving health care and health delivery sector, in Europe and world-wide. In addition, the event was timed to coincide with the 4th call for proposals by the IST programme in the 6th Framework Programme of the European Commission. The main goal of the workshop was to facilitate a forum to disseminate progress within the research area of personalised health management systems and to foster collaborations and information exchanges for future efforts. In conjunction with this, the workshop aimed to bring together researchers from academia, industry and clinical health care provision and emphasise the need for multi-disciplinary collaborations in the future developments of personalised health management systems.
The development and advancement of personalised health management systems requires the consideration of advances in sensor technologies and advanced textiles in addition to nanotechnologies and evolving information and communication technologies. We are now living in an environment where changes in healthcare structures and requests from patients to have an increased participation in their own health care are demanding the availability of affordable and readily available personalised health management systems. Recent research has taken us a step closer in providing such solutions, however, efforts are still required to address the issues of integration of new technologies into existing health care practices, implications of interoperability of services, analysis of results following large scale clinical evaluations and development of technology which is small, reliable and affordable by its users.
The workshop programme was designed to facilitate presentations being delivered by leading researchers describing current trends in personalised health management systems in addition to the challenges which are ahead. Areas addressed were Wearable Sensing, Smart Textiles, Standards & Interoperability and Community Health. This book is based on the presentations delivered at the workshop and includes full papers describing the developments and trends in the aforementioned topics. Consideration of the vision of these contributions has provided indications of strategic developments which should be considered to allow the deployment of personalised health management systems into our every day lives.
The Editors, Dr Chris Nugent, Dr Paul McCullagh, Dr Eric McAdams, Dr Andreas Lymberis