First Ubiquitous IT Europe Forum

The first European conference dedicated to uHealth is coming up in Bonn, Germany. Among organizers are University of Bonn, Fraunhofer IAIS, the Institute for Intelligent Analysis and Information Systems, u-Korea Forum and Korea u-City Association. Find more information on the conference website:
The Ubiquitous IT Europe Forum organizes, in conjunction with the University of Bonn and Aving Global News Network, a series of conferences on the topic of ubiquitous computing.
The first event in this series takes place in Bonn, Germany between March 10th and 12th, 2008. The main objective is to bring together the Asian and European communities that actively work on ubiquitous technologies to foster the exchange of experiences and encourage future global collaborations. The conference will be held at the World Congress Center in Bonn, which is the former federal government Plenary Chamber.
Attendance is free, and the conference program has 16 sessions addressing uCity Technologies, European Projects, uApplications. In addition Keynotes and Panel Discussions are scheduled.

Swarm Intelligence and Swarm Robotics in uHealth?

Swarm Intelligence (SI) is defined as "-the property of a system whereby the collective behaviours of (unsophisticated) agents interacting locally with their environment cause coherent functional global patterns to emerge. SI provides a basis with which it is possible to explore collective (or distributed) problem solving without centralized control or the provision of a global model. (ref;http://staff.washington.edu/paymana/swarm/)". The Wikipedia definition is: "Swarm intelligence (SI) is an artificial intelligence technique based around the study of collective behavior in decentralized, self-organized systems.
A relevant link here goes to Swarm robotics defined in Wikipedia as "- a new approach to the coordination of multirobot systems which consist of large numbers of relatively simple physical robots. The goal of this approach is to study the design of robots (both their physical body and their controlling behaviors) such that a desired collective behavior emerges from the inter-robot interactions and the interactions of the robots with the environment, inspired but not limited by the emergent behavior observed in social insects, called swarm intelligence. It has been discovered that a set of relatively primitive individual behaviors enhanced with communication will produce a large set of complex swarm behaviors."
The Wikipedia article on swarm robotics continues;
"Unlike distributed robotic systems in general, swarm robotics emphasizes a large number of robots, and promotes scalability, for instance, by using only local communication. Local communication is usually achieved by wireless transmission systems, using radio frequency or infrared communication.
Potential application for swarm robotics include tasks that demand for extreme miniaturization (nanorobotics, microbotics), on the one hand, as for instance distributed sensing tasks in micromachinery or the human body."
Swarm intelligence and swarm robotics  represents an interesting perspective to large scale ubiquitous/uHealth sensor networks applied in healthcare. The need for some kind of swarm intelligence is obvious with use of large numbers of sensors (ambient of BAN-type) and the need for systems for valuable data extraction from distributed sensors like motes or Sun Spots. Some level of problem solving capabilities are likely to be needed for handling of data streams. Both Tmote Sky motes and Sun SPOTS can be manually programmed "on the fly", passing updates from unit to unit in an epidemic manner. 

What is uHealth?

What is uHealth (or u-health)? - well, if you try to look around the web, it doesn't seem to exist. There is not much on search engines (apart from this blog climbing rapidly to the top of a Google search) and it does not have a page in Wikipedia.

A wider search including 'ubiquitous health' or healthcare starts to throw up a few more hits, but many lead to dead links. So, it seems to be a term that people have started to use, but haven't taken things much further than that.

It was mentioned in 2006 in the Opening Keynote speech at the NI2006 Congress (see our blog post at http://differance-engine.net/ni2006blog/?p=22) and generated quite a lot of discussion at the conference and the subsequent Post Congress Conference (proceedings forthcoming).

Dr. Unna Huh, President of the Information and Communications University, Korea spoke on "U-Korea: ubiquitous technology and health care" and covered 4 areas - the changing world of knowledge and IT; e-Korea; u-Korea; and u-health. The Korean Government, it was said, has instituted the u-health (ubiquitous health) services project to provide healthcare services to rural areas through electronic networks.

So, what is uHealth? - we will post here some ideas taken from the NI2006 Post Congress Conference discussions as a start to discussing the ideas more widely.