Healthcare (SCI & SSCI)

Special Issue "Mobile Health Care with Smart Technology Applications"

Dear Colleagues,

Smart technologies have been widely applied to mobile health care. Some major trends are summarized as follows. Mobile recommendation systems (or apps) recommend patients to the most suitable clinics or health care facilities by considering their preferences. Smart watches have full mobile phone capability and are equipped with sensors such as thermometers and heart rate monitors. The sensors monitor and help to maintain users’ physical conditions that can be conveyed to the backend server for further diagnosis. In a smart hospital, wireless sensors are attached to patients on the move to collect real-time information, such as their pulses and oxygen saturation readings. For a similar purpose, smart clothes are increasingly popular for monitoring health care conditions due to the miniaturization of sensors. An advance in hardware is three-dimensional printers that can be applied to print a patient’s implants and organs wherever they go. To assist in such operations, the medical record of a patient can be put on a cloud to be accessed from anywhere. Some smart technologies can even overcome the limitations of existing technologies. For example, smart glasses use video cameras and light-emitting diode arrays to assist people with extremely bad vision. Obviously, the applications of smart technologies have enhanced mobile health care.

For the aforementioned reasons, this Special Issue is intended to provide the technical details of smart technologies for enhancing mobile health care. These details will hold great interest for researchers in health care, smart technology, quality technology, quantitative management, ambient intelligence, mobile commerce, operations research, system science, and information management, as well as for practicing managers and engineers. This Special Issue features a balance between state-of-the-art research and practical applications and also provides a forum for researchers and practitioners to review and disseminate quality research work on smart technologies for enhancing mobile health care and the critical issues for further development.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:
•Smart technologies for mobile health care service recommendation
•Smart technologies for better awareness when searching for health care services
•Smart technologies for better efficiency when accessing a health care service
•Smart technologies for finding more suitable health care services
•Assessing the quality of a mobile health care system (or service): User-responded outcomes/interviewing/questionnaire survey; structural equation modeling; biometry/biostatistics; Kano model; soft computing
•Smart technologies for improving the quality of a mobile health care service
•Smart technologies for load balancing among mobile health care services
•Smart technologies for increasing the preparedness of a mobile health care service
•Smart clinics and hospitals
•Smart service networks for mobile health care
•Wirelessly connected smart systems for mobile heath care
•Interactive smart systems for mobile health care
•Predictive smart systems for mobile health care
•Cost-effectiveness analysis of a smart technology application to mobile health care
•Optimization issues in a smart technology application to mobile health care
•Other related topics

Prof. Dr. Katsuhiro Honda
Prof. Dr. Tin-Chih Chen
Prof. Dr. Min-Chi Chiu
Guest Editors


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 papers will be 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. Healthcare is an international peer-reviewed open access quarterly 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 1000 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.