The overall goal of the conference remains tightly coupled with the original aims of the field, to address a set of related technologies and concepts that help integrate healthcare more seamlessly into everyday life, regardless of space and time. To achieve this, it is necessary to take a multidisciplinary approach to Pervasive Healthcare Technology research and development. The Pervasive Healthcare Community has a broad scope of research topics and concerns: identifying and understanding problems from a technological, social, and medical perspective (with a particular emphasis on understanding and supporting patient needs); design, implementation, and evaluation of supporting hardware and software infrastructures, algorithms, and applications; and organizational strategies that facilitate integration of Pervasive Healthcare Technology into the healthcare enterprise.

The 2012 Pervasive Healthcare conference aims to gather technology experts, practitioners, industry and international authorities contributing towards the assessment, development and deployment of pervasive medical based technologies, standards and procedures.The theme of this year's conference is: Coping with the Challenges and Opportunities within Pervasive E-Healthcare (COPE), with a special focus on pervasive healthcare management and its ability to deliver timely, quality based information to medical practitioners in providing high levels of patient care. The challenges and opportunities within e-Healthcare are immense. A multidisciplinary and coordinated approach is needed from 1) user requirements, 2) technology development and 3) application integration, to help deliver a successful pervasive healthcare management system.

Traditional healthcare environments are extremely complex and challenging to manage, as they are required to cope with an assortment of patient conditions under various circumstances with a number of resource constraints. Pervasive healthcare technologies seek to respond to a variety of these pressures by successfully integrating them within existing health care environments.

Technologies, standards and procedures on their own provide little and or no meaningful service. It is essential that pervasive healthcare environments, through a combined approach of data collection, data correlation and data presentation, assist health care professionals in delivering high levels of patient care, and empower individuals and their families for self-care and health management.

We seek novel, innovative, and exciting work in areas including but not limited to:

Pervasive Healthcare Management
Challenges surrounding data quality
Standards and interoperability in pervasive healthcare
Business cases and cost issues
Security and privacy issues
Training of healthcare professional for pervasive healthcare
Legal and regulatory issues
Insurance payments and cost aspects
Staffing and resource management

Understanding users and human aspects in Pervasive Healthcare User requirements, studies or new designs addressing healthcare challenges
Identifying and addressing stakeholder conflicts: patient needs, caregiver needs, health professional needs, organizational needs
Usability and acceptability
Barriers to adoption, and enablers
Social implications of pervasive health technology, and social inclusion
Coverage and delivery of pervasive healthcare services Patient empowerment
Diversity: population and condition-specific requirements Inclusive research and design: engaging underrepresented populations

Technology
Sensor-based decision support systems
Design and evaluation of patient and ambient-related sensors
Wearable and implantable sensor integration
Data fusion in pervasive healthcare environments
Data mining medical patient records
Software architectures e.g. Agent, SOA, distributed middlewares
Electronic Health Records (EHR)
Physiological models for interpreting medical sensor data
Context and activity recognition
Fall detection
User modelling and personalization
Modelling of Pervasive Healthcare environments

Applications themes
Autonomous systems to support independent living
Clinical applications, validation and evaluation studies
Telemedicine
Chronic disease and health risk management applications
Health promotion and disease prevention
Home based health and wellness measurement and monitoring
Continuous vs event-driven monitoring of patients
Smart homes and hospitals
Using mobile devices in the storage, update, and transmission of patient data
Wellbeing and lifestyle support
Systems to support individuals with auditory, cognitive, or vision impairments
Systems to support caregivers

------------------------------------------------------------------- SUBMISSIONS
------------------------------------------------------------------- Each paper will be blind peer-reviewed by members of the Pervasive Health 2012 program committee with additional expert reviewers drawn from relevant research domains. Submissions will be evaluated based on their originality, significance of the contribution to the field, technical correctness and presentation.  The acceptance rate was under 30% for Pervasive Health 2009 and 2010. Pervasive Health will accept submissions in several categories. More details regarding submissions can be found in: http://pervasivehealth.org/2012/show/cf-papers

------------------------------------------------------------------- IMPORTANT DATES
------------------------------------------------------------------- Paper submission deadline: 1 February 2012
Notification of acceptance: 31 March 2012
Camera-ready submission: 10 April 2012
Conference: 21-24 May 2012

------------------------------------------------------------------- ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
------------------------------------------------------------------- General Chair
Rosa Arriaga, Georgia Tech, Atlanta, USA

Program Chair
Jakob Bardram, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Alex Mihailidis, University of Toronto, Canada
Monica Tentori, UABC, Mexico

Steering Committee
Imrich Chlamtac, CREATE-NET, Trento, Italy
Oscar Mayora-Ibarra , CREATE-NET, Trento, Italy Upkar Varshney, Georgia State University, Atlanta, USA
Venet Osmani, CREATE-NET, Trento, Italy

Local Organizing Chairs
Nadir Weibel, UCSD, San Diego, CA