Broadband Multimedia Sensor Networks in Healthcare Applications

摘要

Since the first special issue on "Telemedicine and Applications" was published in April 2000, advances in broadband network communication technology both wired and wirelesses have expanded telemedicine to a pressing need of high speed networks in medicine and public health care. Recent achievements in these fields have helped to better understanding of computing and communication infrastructure associated with various applications. With appropriately developed advanced infrastructures in network technology the future medicine should provide the increasingly aging world with great benefits for public health care. Such applications are expected to improve future healthcare practices, especially in the areas of telemedicine, sensor network-integrated health care, electronic health records, chronic disease monitoring. It is believed that the wireless broadband network will eventually merge with the wired broadband network to offer both reliability and mobility in the future telemedicine and health care applications. Keeping this goal in mind this special issue is devoted to the theme on "Broadband Multimedia Sensor Networks in Healthcare Applications" in addressing and focusing on the issues of wired and wireless networks in the state-of-art medicine and health care on applications of high speed networks to medicine and healthcare as well as mutual understanding between the network technology and medicine and health care applications. A total of seven papers are selected, each of which is briefly described as follows.