IWINACInternational Work-conference on the Interplay between Natural and Artificial Computation

IWINAC2013: Pre-Organized Session:

S08. Smart Spaces for Health, Safety and Well-being

Chairperson: Rafael Martínez Tomás
Co-chairperson: Antonio Fernández Caballero

Smart spaces refer to built environments such as homes, offices, hospitals, schools, ..., and outdoor areas that are enabled for co-operation of smart objects and systems, and for ubiquitous interaction with human beings. Usually, smart spaces are ordinary environments equipped with multiple sensing systems that can perceive and react to people without requiring them to wear any special equipment. Smart spaces are built on top of a diverse set of core technologies such as:

 
There is no doubt that smart spaces use to focus on empowering the individual to improve and manage personal life conditions and participation as a citizen, elderly, patient, consumer and worker. Let us say a few words about health, safety and well-being concepts. Firstly, health is understood in its broader sense as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. Moreover, health promotion is defined as the process of enabling people to increase control over their health and its determinants, evaluate their health status and thereby improve their health. On the other hand, safety is the condition of being protected against physical, social, spiritual, political, emotional, occupational, psychological, educational or other types or consequences of failure, damage, error, accidents, harm or any other event which could be considered non-desirable. Lastly, well-being is a general term for the condition of an individual or group, for example their social, economic, psychological, spiritual or medical state. In our opinion, smart spaces are for sure able to largely contribute to the increase of people health, safety and well-being.

We encourgage the submission of papers addressing smart spaces consisting of infrastructures (integrating sensors, actuators and processing), intelligent interfaces and robots which proactively support people in their everyday lives in domestic, professional and public environments. The emphasis is on novel, intuitive, immersive interactions between the environment, objects in the environment, machines and users, individually or in groups. Proposals for the integration of different technologies and functions, which have the ability to sense, describe, predict, decide, and to interact with their environment are also welcome. In any of the described domains (health, safety and well-being) it is important to understand the global situation beyond the monitored individual facts. This is achieved through interrelating the various observations and findings captured in the controlled settinga. Only in this way the correspondence with an action plan aimed at resolving the problem is established.

So, this special session aims to provide a meeting and discussion point for researchers interested in the development of novel ideas of smart spaces dedicated to health, safety and well-being, including (but not limited):