The PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments (PETRA) conference is a highly interdisciplinary conference that focuses on computational and engineering approaches to improve the quality of life and enhance human performance in a wide range of settings, in the workplace, at home, in public spaces, urban environments, and other. Outcomes of this conference have a broad impact in application areas that include, manufacturing, transportation, healthcare, energy systems, security and safety, robotics, biomedicine, environment and conservation, and many others. PETRA brings together very different types of technologies to also address important social and healthcare issues for sensitive populations, such as the elderly, persons suffering from chronic conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, Cerebral Palsy, and other disabilities or traumas.

We would like to invite researchers working in the area of healthcare and assisted living to submit their original research findings to the PETRA conference.


Topics and areas of interest include, but are not limited to:

Healthcare Informatics
Big Data Management
Data Privacy and Remote Health Monitoring
Therapy Games and Rehabilitation
Tools, infrastructures, architectures and techniques for designing, implementing and deploying pervasive applications in assistive environments
Sensor networks for pervasive health care
Mobile and wireless technologies for healthcare information storage, transmission, processing, and feedback
Aging and Health smart devices
Wearable, ambient and home based health and wellness measurement and monitoring technologies
Context aware mobile networks
Healthcare privacy and data security
User interface design for assistive environments
Usability and HCI issues, multimodal interfaces
Reasoning systems and machine learning for assistive environments
Safety and home design for assistive environments
Social impact of the use of pervasive technologies on the user in pervasive assistive environments
Integrative user interfaces and visualization for monitoring and caregiver training
Sensor environments for rehabilitation
Game design for cognitive assessment and social interaction studies
Sensor data stream fusion, feature extraction and pattern analysis
Location tracking
Gesture and motion tracking
Sensing of affect, emotion and cognitive state
Behavior-driven assistance
Intelligent biomedical devices for assistive environments
Affect-aware interfaces
Human-robot interaction
Distributed robotics
Image processing tools and applications in healthcare and aging
User cognitive modeling
Virtual and augmented reality environments for assistive applications
Ambient assisted living and health monitoring
Navigation systems for healthcare
Data modeling, ontologies and information management for pervasive assistive environments
Collaboration and data sharing tools
Social, ethical, legal and e-government issues in pervasive healthcare and aging
Wearable devices, wellness measurement and monitoring technologies
Business cases and cost analysis of assistive environments
Development of standards
Home design for intelligent assistive environments
Drug evaluation and discovery through behavioral pattern analysis
Clinical and brain health correlation to behavior
Global Healthcare and the Citizen
Information Technology and Biomedicine
Telemedicine and biotechnology applications
Human Centered Computing and the Senior Citizen
Building smart environments and tools, for virtual and real spaces
Smart materials for rehabilitation
Machine learning and data mining tools for decision making
Devices and orthotics for physical therapy and rehabilitation
Eyetracking
Vocational, Safety and Health
Cognitive Remediation
Haptics