The Global Telehealth 2018 (GT2018) International Conference is the 7th meeting of this series, established in 2010. We are privileged this year to have the event co-located with the Asia Pacific Association for Medical Informatics (APAMI) 2018 Regional Conference and its satellite events in Colombo, Sri Lanka. This year also marks the formal involvement of the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) in the organising of Global Telehealth, through its longstanding Telehealth Working Group. The 2018 conference has also been endorsed by the International Society for Telemedicine and eHealth (ISfTeH), and the Australasian College of Health Informatics (ACHI). The financial support of University of Colombo towards publication costs of this book is greatly appreciated.

The contributions offered here from GT2018 encompass numerous aspects of the event multi-conference theme, “Transforming Healthcare Through Innovation in Digital Health”. The contained papers encompass a range of health situations from public health and primary care through to consumer health informatics, and deal with a variety of themes from data collection and analysis to design of interventions and delivery mechanisms. The work presented includes technical aspects of implementation and algorithm design, to social aspects such as privacy and ethical considerations. The implicit message from this diversity is that innovation is necessary and indeed is happening on many fronts in the broader Telehealth domain.

The format for this Global Telehealth meeting expanded on the previous format of only providing a platform for contributed papers. As in the past, this proceedings book contains only the accepted full-paper, double-blinded, peer-reviewed contributions received for the conference, as judged by the international expert review panel, as well as the editor-reviewed invited keynote papers. Approximately 50% of the total initial submissions were accepted. However, the conference sessions also included a greater variety of content, by introducing short presentations on work in progress and case studies of telehealth systems, accepted on the basis of committee-vetted abstracts. Delegates also attended bonus plenary sessions from the main APAMI conference, and attended an information and planning session held by the IMIA Telehealth Working Group to expose its work to a wider audience.

The conference organisers wish to acknowledge the generous support of the local conference organisers in their inclusion of GT2018 delegates in the main conference, the strong support of the overall event coordinator Prof. Vajira H.W. Dissanayake, and the guidance of the GT2018 General co-Chairs, Dr Shashi B. Gogia and Dr Rohana B. Marasinghe. We also acknowledge the efforts of our two sub-editors, Kerry Yu Fang and Rajvir Kaur, who completed the final format editing of the papers. And last but not least, we sincerely thank the members of the international review committee for their detailed consideration and extensive comments to assist in the selection and improvement of the papers submitted.

Jeewani A. Ginige and Anthony J. Maeder

GT2018 Programme co-Chairs