18th Annual International Philosophy of Nursing Conference

in association with the International Philosophy of Nursing Society
(IPONS)
September 8th, 9th and 10th, 2014

Hosted by the School of Health Sciences, University of Nottingham, England, UK

Brave new world?
Health, technology and evidence based practice

Nurses have seen some fundamental changes in the way that healthcare is delivered. Body care is at the centre of nursing practice but the nature of that care has been extended beyond the personal, human-to-human contact, and is increasingly refracted through the medium of technological/scientific interventions. The way that these technologies interact with the human dimension does, and should, require critical analysis.This is particularly the case for nurses who are increasingly expected to adopt methods and approaches that change the nature of the nurse patient relationship.  Added to this is the way that clinicians/academics/researchers interact with health care issues, locally as well as globally.

There is an established debate and tension within the evidence based practice literature that illustrates a deep ambivalence about how a holistic approach to clinical practice relates to, enhances, or is undermined by the new health technologies. These include care pathways, systematic reviews of knowledge, the enabling/disabling effects of technology and the putative implication that there is an empiricist and dehumanising process involved in these developments. For example, what happens to the complexity of ethical debates when they are shaped in the form of arguments based on literature reviews? These may wittingly or unwittingly serve as a means of translating complex moral issues into usable clinical regimes that partially mimic meta-analyses. Furthermore we may ask what place narrative knowledge and qualitative experiences may have in this new world of implementation technologies? And how do the new interventions of telemedicine and other policy drivers that emphasise the “hospital-at-home” impact on the ways that nurses carry out health care?

This conference intends to examine these and other issues related to ‘Health, technology, and evidence-based practice’.

CONFERENCE DETAILS

Details of the Conference can now be found at the following link:
http://www.nottingham.ac.uk/conference/fac-mhs/healthsciences/aipnursingconference/index.aspx

These details include the list of Keynote speakers; the venue; a Call for Abstracts; conference registration and accommodation, and transportation. Abstracts of the Keynote speakers and the full Conference Programme will be available soon on the above link.

Any specific queries should be addressed to Dr Stuart Nairn
stuart.nairn AT nottingham.ac.uk

other IPONS posts on W2tQ

Call for Papers Springer Personal and Ubiquitous Computing Journal: Issue Topic; Behaviour and Health

Mobile and wearable sensors are increasingly permeating everyday life and becoming an integral part of it. Information gathered from these sensors can provide unprecedented insights into diverse aspects of human behaviour. Analysis of human behaviour is of special interest in healthcare, since the health state of a person depends on behaviour aspects, including physical activity levels, amount of social activity, work-life balance and other aspects that are relevant for specific health conditions.

The main goal of this special issue is to explore the link between human behaviour and health. In particular, sensing modalities, data processing methods and behaviour capturing techniques that facilitate this exploration are of interest. Considering the interdisciplinary nature of the work in this area, papers are invited from both technical and medical perspectives that provide new understandings of the link between behaviour and health.

For this special issue topics of interest include, but are not limited to:

1. Technology for behaviour sensing:

- Exploitation of pervasive sensors: Activity sensors,
- connectivity sensors, microphones and webcams as included in smart phones, tablets, game consoles, etc.
- Development of new mobile medical sensor systems for outpatient use
- Unobtrusive sensor systems for long-term behaviour monitoring
- Sensors and actuators for wellness, fitness and rehabilitation
- Bio and physiological measurement technology
- Sensor systems for specific pathologic behaviour, illnesses or mental disorders
- Wearable sensors and brain computer interfaces
- Solutions for usability issues (textile sensors, unobtrusive power supply, data storage and communication, etc.)

2. Application of behaviour sensors in health domain:

- Feasibility studies on new behaviour sensor modalities
- Cross-section studies on the usability
- Longitudinal studies / medical trials on accuracy / effectiveness of applied behaviour sensors
- Ethical and legal requirements concerning sensor systems
- Health monitoring in clinical and daily life environment
- Games in assessment and therapy
- Cognitive behavioural therapy, speech therapy, music therapy and experiences with new therapies
- Supporting maintenance of mental wellness

3. Signal processing of behaviour data:

- Innovative algorithms for assessment of long-term physiological and behavioural data
- Identification of clinical meaningful features based on measured sensor data
- Approaches for data fusion of different sensor modalities
- Activity recognition for health applications
- Machine-learning and classification problems
- Handling missing or untrusted data
- Models for interpreting medical sensor data
- HCI for patients, caregivers and health insurance
- Prediction of disease or episode onset
- Decision support for therapy planning
- Virtual reality systems for therapy
- Support for preventative measures

4. Organizational and legal aspects:

- Inclusion of behaviour data in electronic health records
- Privacy/security issues of extensive behaviour data collections
- Business cases / market analysis for behaviour based health applications in home and clinical environments
- Tele health and mobile technology
- Interaction Designs and Applications for patient self-care
- Persuasive technologies and approaches for behaviour shaping
- Practical inclusion of behaviour data recording and analysis in daily clinical work, regarding prevention, monitoring and treatment of diseases

Submissions:

Deadline for manuscript submission: (EXTENDED) March 14th, 2014
Notification: April 30th, 2014
Tentative publication: Summer 2014

Papers should be around 10-15 pages (soft limit) using the journal
Instructions for Authors.

Please submit the initial manuscript to:
https://www.easychair.org/conferences/?conf=puchealth2014

Submissions should be blind, with no author identifying information.
With your submission, please also suggest three potential reviewers.

Guest Editors:
Franz Gravenhorst (gravenhorst AT ife.ee.ethz.ch), ETH Zurich, Switzerland
Venet Osmani, CREATE-NET, Italy
Bert Arnrich, Bogazici University, Turkey
Amir Muaremi, ETH Zurich, Switzerland

ERCIM News No. 95 Special theme: "Image Understanding"

Dear ERCIM News Reader,

ERCIM News No. 95 has just been published at
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en95

Special Theme: "Image Understanding"
Guest editors: Michal Haindl, Institute of Information Theory and Automation, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, and Josef Kittler, University of Surrey, UK
http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/en95/special/

Keynote: "Image Understanding – An EU Perspective"
by Libor Král, Head of Unit A2 – Robotics in Directorate General Communication Networks, Content & Technology, European Commission

This issue for download
pdf: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN95/EN95-web.pdf
epub: http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/images/stories/EN95/EN95.epub

Next issue: No. 96, January 2014 - Special Theme: "Linked Open Data"
(see Call at http://ercim-news.ercim.eu/call)

Thank you for your interest in ERCIM News.
Feel free to forward this message to others who might be interested.

Best regards,
Peter Kunz
ERCIM News central editor

------------------------------------------------------------------------
ERCIM "Alain Bensoussan" Fellowship Programme
ERCIM offers fellowships for PhD holders from all over the world. The next round is open!
Next deadline 31 October 2013
http://fellowship.ercim.eu/

HSJ: The NHS and fundamental change ...

 ... governments typically try to will the end but not the means: they try to shift the habits of the NHS while protecting buildings and people; or in Lord Darzi's pithy phrase, they change "the anatomy of the NHS rather than its physiology". p.16.

Finding the pith in Hodges' model (and the problem of refactoring - where would you like to start?):

INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

individual

PURPOSE cognitive geography (the 'physiology' of mindsets)	Anatomy & Physiology PROCESS  structure, buildings,geography time, events, space
(habituated - ) PRACTICE (collective purposes) team integration	the NHS (organisation) POLICY workforce, funding  local, regional, national, global

group - population

Seddon, N. (2013) Opinion: Learning from international innovators, HSJ, 12 April. 123: 6346; 16-17.

SocInfo2012: 4th Int. Conference on Social Informatics

Dear all,
The Fourth International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2012) will be hosted at the EPFL in Lausanne (CH), in collaboration with the team Humanités Digitales@unil (University of Lausanne), on the 5-7 December 2012.

The general co-chairs are Karl Aberer, School for Computer and Communication Science, EPFL, Switzerland and Andreas Flache, Director of Studies, Department of Sociology, University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

The call for papers is open until the 7th of July, the tutorial proposals, Poster/Demonstration Papers and Panel Proposals until the 28th of July.

All information here: http://www.socinfo2012.com

The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2012) is an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from Computer Science, Informatics, Social Sciences and Management Sciences to share ideas and opinions, and present original research work on studying the interplay between socially-centric platforms and social phenomena. The ultimate goal of Social Informatics is to create better understanding of socially-centric platforms not just as a technology, but also as a set of social phenomena. To that end, we are inviting interdisciplinary papers, on applying information technology in the study of social phenomena, on applying social concepts in the design of information systems, on applying methods from the social sciences in the study of social computing and information systems, on applying computational algorithms to facilitate the study of social systems and human social dynamics, and on designing information and communication technologies that consider social context.

A special focus of SocInfo'2012 is on how technology can influence social phenomena through better motivation of human agents, through the use of social norms, through better modeling, or through a better understanding of social concepts like trust, credibility, privacy, and fairness. To this end we are especially inviting contributions demonstrating how behavioral theory can be formalized in agent-based models to study social dynamics. It is the expectation that this contributes to a further development of the social sciences with respect to studying and explaining various behavioral dynamics, such as opinion dynamics, social conflict, innovation diffusion, market dynamics, and
crowd behavior. On the other hand, the creation of a coherent social behavioral model that is formulated as an agent system is a prerequisite for further development of socially-centric platforms and for the testing of new algorithms that use social concepts and attempt to realize social goals.
Best regards,

Claire Clivaz, University of Lausanne