New scientific and technical improvements impact very deeply health information systems. On one side progress on wireless networks, sensors (for people and their environment) and mobile devices facilitate ambient information systems, on the other, improvement in distributed data management, adaptive interfaces, collaborative tools and methods, semantic models (ontologies) promote better support for personal health records and medical knowledge and more generally data sharing. All these together make Health Ambient Information Systems possible and place them as an important and challenging element for our society. The main reasons are that such systems: - allow to decrease or restrain health costs by reducing physician acts; - provide a tool-based collaboration between health professionals; - make feel citizens secure and more responsible of their own medical environment.
Ana Marilza Pernas, Jonas Bulegon Gassen and José Palazzo M. De Oliveira describe the development of models and techniques to locate, standardize and extract the content in web pages associated with health issues. After that, the objective is to provide an appropriate content to evaluate the quality of a web page according to specific metrics. The last paper wrote by Fernando Varella, Guilherme Lima, Cirano Iochpe and Valter Roesler present a comparison study made in order to select a reliable method for ECG beat classification running in a mobile phone. Three ECG beat classification methods were selected to be analyzed and implemented in a mobile phone. Tests were made in regions with limited cell phone network coverage in south Brazil.
This volume collects articles presented at the HamIS and includes topics regarding information technological support for healthcare including the monitoring of activities in smart environments, data quality analysis in e-health, process models to guide data mining in the health care sector, usability in healthcare, models and techniques to locate, standardize as well as content extraction in web pages associated with health issues and methods for mobile electrocardiogram. The presented papers contribute for the better understanding of these topics.
Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to the CITA 2011 organizers, Professor José Valdeni and José Palazzo, to our invited speakers Professor Valter Roesler and Cirano Iochpe. Moreover, we are grateful to the authors for submitting their manuscripts to the HamIS 2011. We also would like to thanks the PNPD and the SticAmSud Programs of the Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior (CAPES) from the Brazilian Government.