Konstantinos Siassiakos

Wireless Technologies for Ambient Assisted Living and Healthcare: Systems and Applications

ABSTRACT This chapter presents the concept of Smart Home, describes the Smart Home networking technologies and discusses the main issues for ensuring security in a Smart Home environment. Nowadays, the integration of current communication and information technologies within the dwelling has led to the emergence of Smart Homes. These technologies facilitate the building of Smart Home environments in which devices and systems can communicate with each other and can be controlled automatically in order to interact with the household members and improve the quality of their life. However, the nature of Smart Home environment, the fact that it is always connected to the outside world via Internet and the open security back doors derived from the household members raise many security concerns. Finally, by reviewing the existing literature regarding Smart Homes and security issues that exist in Smart Home environments, the authors envisage to provide a base to broaden the research in Smart Home security.

Handbook of Research on Distributed Medical Informatics and E-Health

Recent developments in e-health have enhanced the healthcare industry as well as expanded the role of medical informatics. These emerging innovations have not only given patients the opportunity for quality of life improvement, but also opened the door to health communication exploration. The Handbook of Research on Distributed Medical Informatics and E-Health provides comprehensive coverage of the most important issues, concepts, new trends, and advanced technologies in healthcare. This enhanced resource of over 30 articles from 84 international experts contributes a compendium of terms, definitions, and explanations for academicians and health professionals worldwide.

Electronic customer relationship management applications and consumer trust in e-commerce

The proliferation of electronic customer relationship management (e-CRM) and its alarming failure rate call for a better understanding of the relationship between e-CRM and its immediate objective: customer satisfaction. This research paper investigates the applications of e-CRM and an important factor of e-CRM success: consumers trust in e-commerce. Integration of both technological and marketing elements, e-CRM covers all aspects of the customers online experience throughout the entire transaction cycle. The present paper describes the significant differences between e-CRM and CRM technology and gives a number of e-CRM applications in various areas, in order to present the benefits of using e-CRM.

Simulation and learning environments in health care

This paper aims to present various learning environments and simulation examples for medical purposes in the world. More than ever, medical students and healthcare professionals are faced with floods of data of which the relevant information has to be selected and applied. The internet and the new media are a fertile ground to meet these requirements. More and more physicians accept e-learning as a new tool and an attractive adjunct to the traditional face to-face teaching in medicine. Simulation allows significant exploration of multiple options, without spending enormous amounts of money on staff, training, equipment and, most importantly, without risking possible degradation in the level of healthcare. This paper describes the success stories in simulation in health care and describes the most important benefits for all parties of the simulation and learning environments in health sciences.

Collaborative technologies and applications

Collaborative technologies accelerate information flow to drive revenue and productivity. Effective collaboration has become a business imperative. Professionals in all walks of life – from salespeople to health workers – must be able to access and share key data instantly from wherever they happen to be at any given time. The interest in social networking and collaborative software is pervasive, from people using tools outside the work environment to fully sanctioned wiki environments inside organisations. Senior technology and business decision-makers need to face up to this new reality by bringing disparate social networking and collaborative tools under a cohesive, enterprise-wide computing infrastructure. Collaborative learning activities can include collaborative writing, group projects, joint problem solving, debates, study teams, and other activities. The present paper aims to present the main collaboration tools and examples of collaborative projects in order to give new ideas to the readers for the design of new collaboration applications.