Wearable Therapy - Detecting Information from Wearables and Mobiles that are Relevant to Clinical and Self-directed Therapy

Abstract

Background: This accompanying editorial provides a brief introduction into the focus theme "Wearable Therapy".

Objectives: The focus theme "Wearable Therapy" aims to present contributions which target wearable and mobile technologies to support clinical and self-directed therapy.

Methods: A call for papers was announced to all participants of the "9th International Conference on Pervasive Computing Technologies for Healthcare" and was published in November 2015. A peer review process was conducted to select the papers for the focus theme.

Results: Six papers were selected to be included in this focus theme. The paper topics cover a broad range including an approach to build a health informatics research program, a comprehensive literature review of self-quantification for health self-management, methods for affective state detection of informal care givers, social-aware handling of falls, smart shoes for supporting self-directed therapy of alcohol addicts, and reference information model for pervasive health systems.

Conclusions: More empirical evidence is needed that confirms sustainable effects of employing wearable and mobile technology for clinical and self-directed therapy. Inconsistencies between different conceptual approaches need to be revealed in order to enable more systematic investigations and comparisons.

Keywords: Self-directed therapy; health self-management; pervasive health; self-quantification.