Recent trends in convergence-based smart healthcare service

People today have become more interested in disease prevention and health promotion, rather thandisease treatment, and have shown a tendency to get various types of information from diverse mediaand try to apply it to themselves. Numerous and varied health information web sites have been devel-oped and are now operating. However, they do not seem to actually be effective for users’ healthcareneeds and health promotion, not only because of the limitations of web-based information, but also dueto a lack of customized healthcare services. In the current ubiquitous environment, health informationsupportserviceshavegenerallybeendevelopedin aformat ofinputting bio-information into acomputerfor network-based transmission. For that reason, they are, in fact, quite inconvenient and inefficient. Inthis regard, what is urgently required is to develop a method to supply smart healthcare using conver-gence technologies [1–7]. Therefore, noveltechniques, architectures, algorithms, experiencesregardingmultimedia applications, and industry services should be considered. Some of these research areas arelisted below.– Health computing for convergence– Bioelectronics, biomechanics,telemedicine– Medical imaging, bio-imaging– Surgical technology,medical physics– Innovativeapplications for convergencehealthcare– Artificial organs, biomaterials– Medical information technology– Medical and hospital informatics