Call for Papers

Conference Aim

Everything is affected by the digital revolution. The opportunities for interdisciplinary digital health research bringing together computer science to dramatically improve health and wellbeing of individuals and populations are extraordinary.

Recent technological advances enabled by creation of real-time big data streams, social media, participatory and context-aware systems and infectious disease modelling are the focus of public health informatics with the aim to achieve an integration with the existing national and international surveillance services. Cutting-edge research into web science, medical ontologies and recommender systems provide further opportunities for development of personalized intelligent systems for public and global health. Serious games, gamification and mhealth interventions empower users in developed world but are accelerating unprecedented access to best evidence, medical advice and healthcare services in developing world.

DH 2016, held in conjunction with WWW 2016, will in particular focus on public health computer science covering a wide spectrum of subjects including communities of practice and social networks, analytics and engagement with tracking and monitoring wearable devices, big data, public health surveillance, persuasive technologies, epidemic intelligence, participatory surveillance, serious games for public health interventions and automated early identification of health threats and response.

Conference Tracks

• Big data analytics, crowdsourcing for public health surveillance and emergencies – data science and data analytics, machine learning, NLP, outbreak/signal detection and early warning systems, pandemics now-casting, epidemic intelligence, participatory surveillance
• Web 2.0, online medical/patient communities of practice and persuasive technology – online medical interventions for healthy lifestyle and wellbeing, harnessing and mining user-generated content, wikis, Web 2.0, patient support groups and Professional Communities of Practice, persuasive/assistive technology, web science, argumentation techniques for health interventions and support for long term conditions,
• Smart Health and intelligent ubiquitous technologies for health and wellbeing – smart health, agents in healthcare, ubiquitous technologies, knowledge extraction and knowledge discovery,  artificial intelligence in health
• Social Computing for Health – Assessing the quality, understandability, and reliability of social media data for health; understanding individual health; fusion of online social behavior and offline health data; incentivising healthy lifestyle through social media; online health communities; health-related behaviour influence in networks
• Tracking/wearable and mobile technology – med-tech, monitoring and tracking devices, apps, quantify self, fitness and wellbeing technology, healthy lifestyle and physical exercise promotion technology, mhealth, public health interventions using mobile technology, global health, personalisation and profiling, recommender systems
• mhealth for global health in low and middle income settings
• Digital Prevention and Interventions – digital prevention programmes, knowledge, attitude and behaviour changing digital interventions, personalised care and empowerment of patients and citizens
• Semantic Web, Knowledge Management/Extraction, Web Science and Health –  annotation, health care ontologies and taxonomies, knowledge management, knowledge extraction, mining health information, web science, coding/messaging standards and interoperability, semantic navigation and search, reasoning
• E-learning, training and serious games for health – serious games for health digital storytelling for health, authoring tools, training resources online, evaluations of educational impact, qualitative and quantitative impact studies
• Industry and Start Up Track – opportunity to demonstrate new products, share experience and network
• PhD Track

Conference Audience

While held in conjunction with WWW 2016, building on interdisciplinary success of ehealth 2008-11 series, the aim of the conference is to bring together an multidisciplinary spectrum of researchers, industry/start-ups and healthcare practitioners. Submissions are welcome from the range of stakeholders involved in digital health including:

• academia (computer scientists, health informaticians, public health experts, epidemiologists, clinicians, GPs)
• national and international public health agencies (e.g. PHE, InVS, RKI, ECDC, WHO)
• epidemic intelligence systems providers (MEdi+Board, GPHIN, MediSys, HealthMap)
• NGOs and Agencies (MSF, Red Cross/Crescent, UNHCR, UN ITU, etc)
• industry and start-ups, Medtech, IT/SM industry, pharmaceutical industry

 Important Dates 

Main Tracks:   
Submission Deadline: Extended to 11th January 2016 Midnight UTC (Hawaii Time) 5th January 2016
Notification of Acceptance: Extended to 16th February 2016 5th February 2016
Camera-Ready Deadline: 23rd March 2016

Posters and Demos:
Submission Deadline: Extended to 11th January 2016 5th January 2016
Notification of Acceptance: Extended to 16th February 2016 5th February 2016

6th Digital Health Conference: 11th -13th April 2016

Submissions

The Proceedings of the Digital Health conference 2016 papers will be peer reviewed by three members of the TPC for relevance, originality, quality and included in the Digital Health 2016 Proceedings, published by ACM in conjunction with WWW 2016 Proceedings.

Any paper of 4 pages or more that has been accepted for a journal or conference after peer reviewing, constitutes research – which must be considered in judging the novelty and relevance. All submitted papers (including extended abstracts) must:

• be written in English;
• contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;
• be formatted according to the ACM SIGMOD Proceedings template with a font size no smaller than 9pt;
• be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for US Letter size.

There are three types of submissions:

1. Long research papers: no more than 10 pages, including the abstract, references, and appendices;
2. Short research papers: 5 pages, including references.
3. Extended Abstracts (aimed at health professionals or early stage work): up to 2 pages, to be accepted either as oral (published) or poster (not published). Medical abstracts may follow the medical paper structure (background, aims, methods, results, conclusions), but this is not essential;
4. Posters: (Title + Short abstract up to 200 words, not published).
5. Demos: Title and Short Abstract (up to 200 words)Full papers, short papers and oral abstracts will be published in the ACM DH 2016 Proceedings. Posters and Demos will feature on the event website and in the Abstracts book distributed at the conference. It is the authors’ responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format.

Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

Extended revisited papers will have the opportunity to be submitted to the Frontiers in Digital Health Research Topic (Special Issue) after the conference.

Submissions can be made here.