Call for Papers: Special Issue on the Affective Impact of Next-Generation Intelligent Health Systems

IEEE Transactions on Affective Computing

DEADLINES: Open for Submissions: 1 January 2025 Submissions due: 31 May 2025 Publication: Oct-Dec 2025 TOPIC SUMMARY: Nowadays, all over the world, the number of ICT investments in health and well-being is rapidly increasing. In this context, there is a growing interest in telemedicine that allows the provisioning of various kinds of health-related services and applications over the Internet. The benefit of telemedicine is twofold: on the one hand, it pushes down clinical costs and on the other hand, it improves the quality of life of both patients and their families. Telemedicine solutions are typically aimed at tele-nursing, tele-rehabilitation, tele-dialog, tele-monitoring, tele-analysis, tele-pharmacy, tele-trauma care, tele-psychiatry, tele-radiology, tele-pathology, tele-dermatology, tele-dentistry, tele-audiology, tele-ophthalmology, etc. In recent years the rapid advent and evolution of emerging ICT technologies (such as the Internet of Things (IoT), Cloud/Edge/Fog computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Blockchain, etc.) are revolutionizing telemedicine. In this context, the way of interaction between humans including patients and medical personnel and emerging eHealth applications is rapidly and deeply changing. Specifically, there are many affective factors that condition the interaction between humans and the eHealth technology, on how affective sensing and simulation techniques can inform our understanding of human affective processes, and on the design, implementation and evaluation of systems that carefully consider affecting among the factors that influence their usability. This special issue focuses on all the affecting computing aspects originated by emerging tele-healthcare solutions. Topics of interest include (but are not limited to):

Emerging architectures for health influencing both physicians’ and patients’ behaviours and emotions;
Computer-aided clinical diagnosis and therapy changing the traditional clinical approach;
Networked applications for health changing the way of approaching traditional medicine;
Algorithms for decision support and therapy improvement changing the classical approach of the medical personnel;
AI applications for health influencing the emotional state of people;
Advanced security techniques for health changing the way of approaching the hospital information systems;
Responsible and trustworthy AI for health systems, including security, fairness, explainability, etc;
Ethics around the algorithmic design and deployment of health technologies.

GUEST EDITORS: Theodora Chaspari, University of Colorado Boulder, USA, theodora.chaspari@colorado.edu Giovanna Sannino, ICAR - CNR Italy, giovanna.sannino@icar.cnr.it Antonio Celesti, University of Messina, Italy, acelesti@unime.it Ivanoe De Falco, ICAR - CNR, Italy, ivanoe.defalco@icar.cnr.it Hani Hagras, University of Essex, UK, hani@essex.ac.uk SUBMISSION GUIDELINES: For author information and guidelines on submission criteria, visit the TAC Author Information page. When submitting your paper, please be sure to select the special issue or special section name. Manuscripts should not be published or currently submitted for publication elsewhere. Please submit only full papers intended for review, not abstracts, to the IEEE Author Portal submission system.