The spectacular increase of the average age of the population all over the world is one of the main causes for the huge amount of patients suffering from a variety of chronic diseases, including cardiovascular diseases, diabetes, COPD and many others. Those patients need to be seen by a doctor on a regular basis for a very long period of time, often even decades. In order to reduce the severe costs for society, many governments are now supporting the chronically ill and the elderly to live as independently as possible. In this context a variety of tele monitoring projects and products have been conceived.

The ATDMCP will focus on innovative ambient technologies for diagnosing and monitoring chronic patients and elderly. Those technologies can focus on the hospital, the nursing home or the home environment. ATDMCP studies ambient technologies from three different but complementary perspectives: the engineering point of view (including the development of novel sensory technologies), the computer scientist perspective (including programming languages for ambient programming) and the medical perspective (focusing on the interpretation of the acquired signals).

Consider a 75 years old patient suffering from a severe cardiovascular disease. In order to adapt his/her treatment immediately whenever his/her condition worsens, a wide variety of parameters are monitored on a daily basis, e.g. weight, blood pressure, heart rate, ... Only a few years ago, this required a nurse to pass by every day in order to perform the different examinations and measurements. With the advent of small, easy to use sensors, the patient can monitor his condition himself day after day. However, this still requires a substantial amount of effort as every parameter has to be checked by a different device. Clearly, there is a tendency towards the development of small, wireless sensory devices which can be used for continuous monitoring without the patient’s cooperation. ATDMCP seeks for contributions on the development of new sensory devices for diagnosis and monitoring and on the usage of new sensory modalities for diagnosis and monitoring.

The typical properties of the devices in a network of sensors (e.g. low processing power, limited battery capability, uncertain network connections, etc.) often make it very hard to apply regular software engineering and programming methods to computer programs operating such devices. ATDMCP seeks for contributions on programming techniques and software engineering methodologies dealing for ambient technologies.

The usage of networks of smart sensors for monitoring and diagnosing results in an enormous amount of data. From a medical point of view, this is very interesting, as data can be gathered in a home environment (no white coat effect) and long term observations can be made combining multiple modalities. ATDMCP seeks for contributions describing benefits of ambient technologies for the medical doctor, with respect to quality, ease and price of monitoring and diagnosis tools for the elderly.

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Diagnosis at home
• Technology for monitoring chronic patients (COPD, CVD, diabetes, etc.)
• new sensor modalities for monitoring chronic patients
• programming techniques for ambient technologies
• data analysis in sensor networks
• Influence of ambient technology on medical care
• medical protocols and ambient technologies
• diagnosis and monitoring practices of chronic patients
• user acceptance
• ethical issues of continuous monitoring
• ...