This volume represents the proceedings of the 5th IEEE Eurasia Conference on Biomedical Engineering, Healthcare and Sustainability 2023 (IEEE ECBIOS 2023). This conference was held at Chia Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, Tainan, Taiwan on June 2–4, 2023, co-organized by Chia Nan University of Pharmacy and Science, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the International Institute of Knowledge Innovation and Invention (IIKII). Recently, healthcare is experiencing a cross-sector transformation thanks to advances in computing, networking technologies, big data and artificial intelligence. Healthcare is not only changing from reactive and hospital-centered to preventive and personalized medicine but from disease-focused to well-being-centered treatment. Healthcare systems, as well as fundamental medicine research, are becoming smarter, owing to the development of biomedical engineering. Furthermore, with cutting-edge sensors and computer technologies, healthcare services and technologies are used with better efficiency, higher quality, and lower costs. This conference has offered the opportunity for interdisciplinary collaborations between science and engineering technologists in the academic and industrial fields, as well as international networking. From relevant engineering fields, 97 excellent papers were selected through peer review for the publication of the proceedings of IEEE ECBIOS 2023.

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Robotics and intelligent systems are key technologies to promote efficient and innovative applications in the most diverse domains (industry, healthcare, agriculture, construction, mobility, etc.), performing and supporting activities that are not suitable to be performed by humans. Such activities are frequently time-consuming, repetitive tasks with low added value, which are physically demanding and/or dangerous. Nevertheless, robotics and intelligent systems face several scientific and technological challenges related to their integration and interoperability with other systems, safety, flexibility, re-configurability and autonomy. These challenges are especially relevant when robots operate in real unstructured environments and share a workspace with humans and other equipment. This reprint collects research achievements, ideas, and applications regarding advanced intelligent robotic systems, covering diverse technologies and application domains. Generically, the contributions cover optimal path-planning strategies and innovative designs for mobile manipulators, the integration of robotic and intelligent systems, grasping, manipulation, teleoperation, haptics, user experience approaches for collaborative robots, and multi-agent systems.

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This publication aims to initiate an interdisciplinary discourse on the ethical, legal, and social implications of socially assistive technologies in healthcare. It combines practically relevant insights and examples from current research and development with ethical analysis to uncover moral pitfalls at the intersection between the promotion of social participation and well-being, and risks that may diminish the achievement of these ends.

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This publication aims to initiate an interdisciplinary discourse on the ethical, legal, and social implications of socially assistive technologies in healthcare. It combines practically relevant insights and examples from current research and development with ethical analysis to uncover moral pitfalls at the intersection between the promotion of social participation and well-being, and risks that may diminish the achievement of these ends.

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This edited book presents new results in the area of algorithm development for different types of scheduling problems. In eleven chapters, algorithms for single machine problems, flow-shop and job-shop scheduling problems (including their hybrid (flexible) variants), the resource-constrained project scheduling problem, scheduling problems in complex manufacturing systems and supply chains, and workflow scheduling problems are given. The chapters address such subjects as insertion heuristics for energy-efficient scheduling, the re-scheduling of train traffic in real time, control algorithms for short-term scheduling in manufacturing systems, bi-objective optimization of tortilla production, scheduling problems with uncertain (interval) processing times, workflow scheduling for digital signal processor (DSP) clusters, and many more.

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This book treats the spectacular rise in life expectancy during the last three centuries. It is the first study to bring together both published and unpublished material about the history of the health of Belgian men and women and to analyze it critically. Isabelle Devos studies the mechanisms of the historic fall in the death rate in an original manner and answers the question why research on the causes of this decline has not progressed faster. While the discipline of historical demography orients the first part of her book, the discipline of historical epidemiology provides the perspective taken in the second part, in which the role of insects as spreaders of disease is explored. Essential in her study is the importance of local medical practitioners who already at the end of the Ancien Régime warned of the dangers present in the environment. Their ‘ecological’ thinking created a consciousness that was decisive for the further development of healthcare.

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Remote sensing and GIS play critical roles in water resource and flood inundation mapping and risk management. Remote sensing provides data sources for mapping water resources (snow and glaciers, water bodies, soil moisture and groundwater), measuring hydrological fluxes (ET, precipitation and river discharge), and monitoring drought and flooding inundation, while GIS provides the best tools for water resources, drought and flooding risk management and for setting up hydrologic models, inputting data processing and output analyses and visualizations. This Special Issue Book presents the best practices, cutting-edge technologies and applications of remote sensing, GIS and hydrologic models for water resources mapping, satellite rainfall measurements, runoff simulation, water body and flood inundation mapping and risk management. The latest technologies applied include 3D model analysis and visualization of glaciers, UAV video image classification for turf grass mapping and irrigation planning, ground penetration radar for soil moisture estimates, TRMM and GPM satellite rainfall measurements, storm hyetograph analysis, rainfall runoff and urban flooding simulation, satellite radar and optical image classification for urban water bodies and flooding inundation. The application of these technologies is expected to greatly relieve the pressures on water resources and assist in better mitigating and adapting to the impact of drought and flooding.

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This reprint focuses on applications of machine learning models in a diverse range of fields and problems. It reports substantive results on a wide range of learning methods; discusses the conceptualization of problems, data representation, feature engineering, machine learning models; undertakes critical comparisons with existing techniques; and presents an interpretation of the results. The topics within the chapters of the publication fall into six categories: computer vision, teaching and learning, social media, forecasting, basic problems of machine learning, and other topics.

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In recent years, AI/ML tools have become more prevalent in the fields of medical imaging and imaging informatics, where systems are already outperforming physicians in a range of domains, such as in the classification of retinal fundus images in ophthalmology, chest X-rays in radiology, and skin cancer detection in dermatology, among many others. It has recently emerged as one of the fastest growing research areas given the evolution of techniques in radiology, molecular imaging, anatomical imaging, and functional imaging for detection, segmentation, diagnosis, annotation, summarization, and prediction. The ongoing innovations in this exciting and promising field play a powerful role in influencing the lives of millions through health, safety, education, and other opportunities intended to be shared across all segments of society. To achieve further progress, this Special Issue (SI) invited both research and review-type manuscripts to showcase ongoing research progress and development based on applications of AI/ML (especially DL techniques) in medical imaging to influence human health and healthcare systems in the diagnostic decision-making process. The SI published fourteen articles after a rigorous peer-review process across the spectrum of medical imaging modalities and the diversity of specialties depending on imaging techniques from radiology, dermatology, pathology, colonoscopy, endoscopy, etc.

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Smart cities operate under more resource-efficient management and economy than ordinary cities. As such, advanced business models have emerged around smart cities, which led to the creation of smart enterprises and organizations that depend on advanced technologies. This book includes 21 selected and peer-reviewed articles contributed in the wide spectrum of artificial intelligence applications to smart cities. Chapters refer to the following areas of interest: vehicular traffic prediction, social big data analysis, smart city management, driving and routing, localization, safety, health, and life quality.

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Artificial intelligence (AI), which is the simulation of human intelligence processes by machines, is having a growing impact on healthcare. Via AI, researchers can provide new approaches to merge, analyze, and process complex “big data” and gain more actionable insights, understanding, and knowledge at an individual and population level. Medical staff can be helped by AI-assisted clinical decision support (CDS), i.e., machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) models that analyze large medical datasets. They do this by summarizing radiology and pathology reports by means of natural language processing (NLP), automating repetitive but time-consuming tasks, and much more. Patients can talk to chatbots who have access to all medical knowledge in the world, including the patient’s medical history, and provide personalized advice. This Special Issue intends to show some examples of how AI impacts healthcare, with some discussion on potential future developments as well as challenges. Since this Special Issue contains papers from 2023 and 2024, the era of Generative AI (GenAI), naturally there are papers related to ChatGPT and chatbots. There are also papers on prediction modeling in primary care, polychronic conditions, and heart disease. Other papers focus on the classification of colon cancer and Alzheimer’s disease. Finally, this Special Issue also includes papers on orthodontic diagnosis and treatment planning, anxiety treatment, and explainable AI (XAI).

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Der Strukturwandel im Gesundheitswesen wird häufig als Effizienz- und Qualitätsgewinn zugleich gepriesen. Ein soziologischer Blick indes zeigt: was sich hinter der »Ökonomisierung« der Krankenversorgung verbirgt, ist ein höchst kontroverses Unterfangen. Kaspar Molzberger nimmt in Anlehnung an relationale Sozialtheorien eine Neubestimmung vor. Seine praxissoziologische Studie verdeutlicht, womit die nach professionellen Werten arbeitenden Berufsgruppen in Krankenhäusern zu kämpfen haben, wenn sie den neoliberalen Managementreformen zu entsprechen suchen. Es droht eine »Verkehrung des Gewöhnlichen«: Die Autonomie der Arzt- und Pflegeberufe wird nunmehr als kalkulative behandelt und es ist folglich das Krankenhaus, das mit immer mehr Kranken versorgt werden muss, um zu überleben.

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This Special Issue, “Biotechnology Applications of Microalgae”, is focused on the latest novel advances related to the production of different bioactive compounds from microalgae and their biotechnological use.

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This timely volume responds to the epic impacts of cancer as a global phenomenon. Through the fine-grained lens of ethnography, the contributors present new thinking on how social, economic, race, gender and other structural inequalities intersect, compound and complicate health inequalities. Cancer experiences and impacts are explored across eleven countries: Argentina, Brazil, Denmark, France, Greece, India, Indonesia, Italy, Senegal, the United Kingdom and the United States. The volume engages with specific cancers from the point of primary prevention, to screening, diagnosis, treatment (or its absence), and end-of-life care. Cancer and the Politics of Care traverses new theoretical terrain through explicitly critiquing cancer interventions, their limitations and success, the politics that drive them, and their embeddedness in local cultures and value systems. It extends prior work on cancer, by incorporating the perspectives of patients and their families, ‘at risk’ groups and communities, health professionals, cancer advocates and educators, and patient navigators. The volume advances cross-cultural understandings of care, resisting simple dichotomies between caregiving and receiving, and reveals the fraught ethics of care that must be negotiated in resource-poor settings and stratified health systems. Its diversity and innovation ensures its wide utility among those working in and studying medical anthropology, social anthropology and other fields at the intersections of social science, medicine and health equity.

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This open access book is an unprecedented and comprehensive book that delves deeply into the landscape of cancer care in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). This ground-breaking book is set to become a go-to resource for those interested in gaining an in-depth understanding of the status quo of cancer care across the seven emirates. The book, edited by Prof. Humaid O. Al- Shamsi, a leading oncologist in the region and the President of the Emirates Oncology Society, embarks on a compelling journey by meticulously examining the evolving cancer policies, treatment modalities, and innovative approaches while celebrating notable success stories. At the same time, it sheds light on the persistent challenges and unmet needs that continue to impact cancer care in the UAE. Authored by a distinguished group of experts hailing from various sectors within the UAE, the book brings together perspectives from oncology specialists, researchers, healthcare policymakers, patient advocates, and other key stakeholders involved in patient management. It covers a diverse range of topics crucial to cancer care, including early detection, diagnosis, treatment options, supportive care services, survivorship, palliative care, and ongoing research initiatives. In addition to addressing the general aspects of cancer care, this pioneering book focuses on the unique factors and challenges specific to the UAE. It explores the impact of cultural and social factors, healthcare infrastructure, regulatory frameworks, and the integration of technological advancements in cancer management. The book also examines the role of patient support organizations, patient empowerment, and community engagement in tackling the cancer burden. Each chapter in "Cancer Care in the UAE" offers valuable insights into the challenges faced by different disciplines involved in cancer care and provides a roadmap for transformative change. By presenting an overarching vision and strategic outlook for the next generation, the book serves as a catalyst for positive change in cancer care across the UAE. Endorsed by prestigious organizations such as the Emirates Oncology Society and the Emirates Medical Association, "Cancer Care in the UAE" stands as a testament to its credibility and relevance. This comprehensive book will undoubtedly contribute significantly to enhancing cancer care, fostering collaboration among stakeholders, and ultimately improving outcomes for individuals affected by cancer in the UAE and wider region.

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medical ethics; healthcare; nursing; midwifery

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This book examines the concept of care and care practices in healthcare from the interdisciplinary perspectives of continental philosophy, care ethics, the social sciences, and anthropology. Areas addressed include dementia care, midwifery, diabetes care, psychiatry, and reproductive medicine. Special attention is paid to ambivalences and tensions within both the concept of care and care practices. Contributions in the first section of the book explore phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to care and reveal historical precursors to care ethics. Empirical case studies and reflections on care in institutionalised and standardised settings form the second section of the book. The concluding chapter, jointly written by many of the contributors, points at recurring challenges of understanding and practicing care that open up the field for further research and discussion. This collection will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of medicine, ethics, philosophy, social science and history.

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This book examines the concept of care and care practices in healthcare from the interdisciplinary perspectives of continental philosophy, care ethics, the social sciences, and anthropology. Areas addressed include dementia care, midwifery, diabetes care, psychiatry, and reproductive medicine. Special attention is paid to ambivalences and tensions within both the concept of care and care practices. Contributions in the first section of the book explore phenomenological and hermeneutic approaches to care and reveal historical precursors to care ethics. Empirical case studies and reflections on care in institutionalised and standardised settings form the second section of the book. The concluding chapter, jointly written by many of the contributors, points at recurring challenges of understanding and practicing care that open up the field for further research and discussion. This collection will be of great value to scholars and practitioners of medicine, ethics, philosophy, social science and history.

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The present reprint aimed to present original research articles and reviews concerning the following:Access: affordability, allocation, and preference of food;Availability: the production, distribution, and exchange of food;Circularity in food systems at local, regional, or global levels;The development, impact, and ethics of novel and data-driven technologies in food systems;Food security and policy, governance, institutions, and trade;Influencing food consumption and demand regarding the food environment;The stability and dynamics of food security aspects;Sustainable food systems and agro-ecological food production;Utilization: the nutritional value, social value, and safety of food.

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When the domestic government, the private sector, and people in various professional fields talk about long-term care issues, they all focus on creating a warm and home-like care institution. However, we actively emphasize the importance of community-based long-term care. For “aging in place”, the development of domestic non-institutional care is still in its infancy, and some long-term care needs must still be met through institutional care, and the facilitation of the extension or outreach of community-based care and respite service platforms for the development of community-based long-term care still rely on institutional care. The history of the development of long-term care in Taiwan is much shorter than that of Japan, Europe, the United States, and Canada. Despite years of hard work and rapid development, the long-term care resources needed to establish a complete system in terms of universalization, fairness, accessibility, and selectivity are not available. In the future, based on the soundness of institutional care, it hoped that outreach will move toward the goals of community care and aging in place. We hope the studies in this Special Issue will help further develop clinical medicine for healthcare and stainability.

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The number of patient health data has been estimated to have reached 2314 exabytes by 2020. Traditional data analysis techniques are unsuitable to extract useful information from such a vast quantity of data. Thus, intelligent data analysis methods combining human expertise and computational models for accurate and in-depth data analysis are necessary. The technological revolution and medical advances made by combining vast quantities of available data, cloud computing services, and AI-based solutions can provide expert insight and analysis on a mass scale and at a relatively low cost. Computational intelligence (CI) methods, such as fuzzy models, artificial neural networks, evolutionary algorithms, and probabilistic methods, have recently emerged as promising tools for the development and application of intelligent systems in healthcare practice. CI-based systems can learn from data and evolve according to changes in the environments by taking into account the uncertainty characterizing health data, including omics data, clinical data, sensor, and imaging data. The use of CI in healthcare can improve the processing of such data to develop intelligent solutions for prevention, diagnosis, treatment, and follow-up, as well as for the analysis of administrative processes. The present Special Issue on computational intelligence for healthcare is intended to show the potential and the practical impacts of CI techniques in challenging healthcare applications.

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Sensors used to diagnose, monitor or treat diseases in the medical domain are known as medical sensors. There are several types of medical sensors that can be utilized for various applications, such as temperature probes, force sensors, pressure sensors, oximeters, electrocardiogram sensors that measure the electrical activity of the heart, heart rate sensors, electroencephalogram sensors that measure the electrical activity of the brain, electromyogram sensors that record electrical activity produced by skeletal muscles, and respiration rate sensors that count how many times the chest rises in a minute. The output of these sensors used to be interpreted by humans, which was time consuming and tedious; however, such interpretations became easy with advances in artificial intelligence (AI) techniques and the integration of the sensor outputs into computer-aided diagnostic (CAD) systems. This reprint presents some of the state-of-the-art AI approaches that are used to diagnose different diseases and disorders based on the data collected from different medical sensors. The ultimate goal is to develop comprehensive and automated computer-aided diagnosis by focusing on the different machine learning algorithms that can be used for this purpose as well as novel applications in the medical field.

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This book discusses the common principles of morality and ethics derived from divinely endowed intuitive reason through the creation of al-fitr' a (nature) and human intellect (al-‘aql). Biomedical topics are presented and ethical issues related to topics such as genetic testing, assisted reproduction and organ transplantation are discussed.

Whereas these natural sources are God’s special gifts to human beings, God’s revelation as given to the prophets is the supernatural source of divine guidance through which human communities have been guided at all times through history. The second part of the book concentrates on the objectives of Islamic religious practice – the maqa' sid – which include: Preservation of Faith, Preservation of Life, Preservation of Mind (intellect and reason), Preservation of Progeny (al-nasl) and Preservation of Property. Lastly, the third part of the book discusses selected topical issues, including abortion, assisted reproduction devices, genetics, organ transplantation, brain death and end-of-life aspects. For each topic, the current medical evidence is followed by a detailed discussion of the ethical issues involved.

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This book discusses the common principles of morality and ethics derived from divinely endowed intuitive reason through the creation of al-fitr' a (nature) and human intellect (al-‘aql). Biomedical topics are presented and ethical issues related to topics such as genetic testing, assisted reproduction and organ transplantation are discussed.

Whereas these natural sources are God’s special gifts to human beings, God’s revelation as given to the prophets is the supernatural source of divine guidance through which human communities have been guided at all times through history. The second part of the book concentrates on the objectives of Islamic religious practice – the maqa' sid – which include: Preservation of Faith, Preservation of Life, Preservation of Mind (intellect and reason), Preservation of Progeny (al-nasl) and Preservation of Property. Lastly, the third part of the book discusses selected topical issues, including abortion, assisted reproduction devices, genetics, organ transplantation, brain death and end-of-life aspects. For each topic, the current medical evidence is followed by a detailed discussion of the ethical issues involved.

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This compendium describes the impact of COVID-19 pandemic on all aspects of people lives. Data presented in this collection will be useful to understand the disruption in healthcare, learning, and socio-economic aspects amidst the pandemic. The sooner we begin to understand the impact, the better placed we will be to address the unmet needs of vulnerable population groups.

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This interdisciplinary volume examines the ethical, legal and regulatory impacts that COVID-19 has had on our society and institutions. Chapters also analyze the broader social and institutional impacts of the pandemic and what longer lasting effects it may have on our society.

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In 2020-2022, much of the world was at risk for catching COVID-19. This reprint, “Crimmigration in the Age of COVID-19,” contributes to understanding immigration during the pandemic. It engages a cross-national and interdisciplinary case-study approach to show how countries carved out exceptions to public health protocols for migrants. In the immigration context a variety of governments weaponized public health protocols to criminalize and exclude migrants. The Trump Administration sadistically misplayed the pandemic at almost every turn. Trump came to power on the backs of migrants, referring to them as murderers and rapists. The intersection of Trump’s COVID-19 and migration policies carved out space for the exceptional dehumanization of migrants in 2020-21. This reprint documents the weaponization of public through crimmigration. Crimmigration is the criminalization of migration and migrants via state-of-the-art surveillance and militarized technologies. During the worst of COVID-19, crimmigration strategies--mandatory detention and harsh exclusions— exacerbated the risk of transmission among migrants. Policies not migrants were to blame here. The ostensibly public health related Title42 actually pushed migrants, already at great risk, into unregulated shantytowns controlled by Mexican drug cartels. Additionally, migrants contended with detention facilities, medium security prisons, that functioned as Petrie dishes for the disease. We hope this reprint contributes to understanding the intersection of public health and crimmigration, and border penologies during these exceptional times.

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Wie können Menschenrechte im Gesundheitswesen respektiert und umgesetzt werden? Dieser Band, der aus einer Forschungsgruppe der "Emerging Fields Initiative" hervorgegangen ist und Ergebnisse einer langjährigen Kooperation von Expert_innen vorstellt, legt theoretische Grundlagen für das Recht auf Gesundheit und zeigt praktische Anwendungen in nationalen wie auch globalen Zusammenhängen. In Kooperation von Autor_innen aus Philosophie, Medizin, Ethik, Recht und Politikwissenschaft sowie unter Beachtung internationaler Perspektiven - u.a. aus der Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) - werden zentrale Fragen an der Schnittstelle von Menschenrechten und Medizinethik erörtert. Mit Beiträgen von Heiner Bielefeldt (Erlangen-Nürnberg/Genf), Lotta Eriksson (Stockholm), Andreas Frewer (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Christina Heinicke (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Michael Krennerich (Erlangen-Nürnberg), Amrei Müller (Oslo), Andreas Reis (Genf), Abha Saxena (Genf), Martina Schmidhuber (Erlangen-Nürnberg/Salzburg) und

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