mHealth in Smart Cities
A special issue of Smart Cities (ISSN 2624-6511). This special issue belongs to the section "Smart Health".
Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (10 April 2022) | Viewed by 10197
Special Issue Editor
Special Issue Information
Dear Colleagues,
Several factors are driving a slow but steady shift in medicine. At present, doctors and hospitals are at the center of health care. Optimistically, people visit the doctor maybe once per year, where they receive expert advice, treatments, and action plans, all within a short 10–15 min meeting with the doctor. Afterward, the patient goes back to their normal daily life and the doctor moves on to the next patient. New trends in health care technology such real-time health interventions (RTHIs) mitigate these limitations by supporting treatments in naturalistic environments—namely, anywhere, and at any time. RTHI systems use wearable sensors and intelligent models for recognizing physical and mental conditions, as well as mechanisms to determine the intervention, the timing, and the dose that maximize the effectiveness of the treatment. In this context, an intervention to support an RTHI system for the treatment of obesity would recognize long periods of sedentarism and recommend physical activity; it could suggest some dietary changes based on prescribed calories, and it also could trigger an alert when the GPS shows the patient is heading to the location of their favorite fast food restaurant.
However, the application of RTHIs in health care is not as rosy as it initially appears, because it usually takes a great deal of patience, dedication, and persistence to alter a long-established behavior pattern. For example, a recent study showed that about 70% of people who acquire wearable devices like Fitbit abandon its use after a few weeks. From an intervention design perspective, it takes a huge investment and cooperation between people from diverse disciplines to successfully implement and deploy effective interventions. A key element for the successful deployment of RTHI systems is patient adherence to interventions or treatment plans.
In this Special Issue we want to explore the use of incentive mechanisms designed to enhance patient adherence to health interventions. We want explore the elements of incentive mechanism design that may be suitable for improving adherence and compliance. We also want to explore the extent to which general-purpose incentive mechanisms may be useful for improving these treatment metrics. Other topics included in this Special Issue include the role of participatory techniques such as crowdsourcing, crowdsensing, and social networks in improving the patient’s probability of successfully self-managing the prescribed interventions.
Dr. Luis G James
Guest Editor
Manuscript Submission Information
Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.
Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Smart Cities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.
Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.
Keywords
- Cyber-physical systems
- Real-time interventions
- Incentive mechanism design
- Crowdsourcing
- Crowdsensing
- Social networks
