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

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.