The ICOST Conference 2019 took place in New York City, USA, from 14th to 15th October. Hosted by the New York University (NYU) and the New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM), the event succeeded also this year in bringing together an international community of researchers and experts from different continents and raised awareness about citizen’s quality of life in our societies.
ICOST2019 aimed to understand and assess how research impacts public health policies when facing emerging social and economic challenges. Indeed, it provided a premier venue for the presentation and discussion of research in the design, development, deployment, and evaluation of AI for health, smart urban environments, assistive technologies, chronic disease management, and coaching and health telematics systems. The two-days conference brought together stakeholders from clinical, Public Health Organizations (PHOs), universities and industries along with end users and family caregivers to explore how to utilize technologies to foster prevention and health promotion, independent living, and offer an enhanced quality of life.
ICOST 2019 was proud to extend its hospitality to an international community consisting of researchers from major universities and research centers, representatives from industry and users from 13 different countries. The ICOST proceedings have now reached over 150,000 downloads, and are in the top 25% of downloads of Springer LNCS.
Download the Conference Proceedings here
This edition of the conference featured a dynamic program incorporating a range of technical, clinical, and industrial related keynote speakers, oral and poster presentations, along with demonstrations and technical exhibits. Among the use cases presented, particularly emphasis was given to PULSE, co-organizer of the event, which aimsat accelerating the use and vision of big data by designing a system to exploit big data value in the public health sector.
During the first day, the project held a dedicated innovation panel titled “PULSE: Participatory Urban Living for sustainable Environments” and moderated by the project coordinator Prof Maria Fernanda Cabrera. The panel, which included experts from four project’s partners: Prof. Riccardo Belazzi (University of Pavia), Prof. Mounir Mokhtari (Istitut Mines-Télécom), Dr Manuel Ottaviano (LifeTech), Vladimir Urosevic (Belit) and Toni Yag (Asus Cloud), highlighted the interlinkages between the urban landscape of cities and the behavior of their residents and how their in-depth comprehension is crucial to impact the public health decision-making process and improve wellbeing and health in the cities.
This panel session has been also the occasion to show the promotional video of PULSE, a video made for the general public, policy makers and researchers with the purpose of disseminate the challenge and the problems that PULSE project addresses, as well as its main goals and results.
During the same day, the scientific paper Transfer Learning for Urban Landscape Clustering and Correlation with Health Indexes (Bellazzi R., Caldarone A., Pala D., Franzini M., Malovini A., Larizza C., and Casella V.) has been presented. The publication leverages some of the PULSE project’s results and is available in the conference proceedings as well. it describes a component of the data analytic platform designed to provide public health decision makers with advanced approaches to jointly analyze maps and geospatial information with health care data and air pollution measurements. This publication, designed to couple deep learning analysis of geospatial images of cities and some healthcare and behavioral indexes collected by the 500 cities US project, is showing that, in New York City, urban landscape significantly correlates with the access to healthcare services.
Furthermore, the second day, partners from Belit and LifeTech gave a demonstration of the tools developed by PULSE, such as the sensors that are allocated in the test beds, the Pulsair App and a wearable solution used to collect data from the citizens, as well as the dashboard functionalities.
For more information about the upcoming publication of PULSE results and next project’s events follow on Twitter, LinkedIn and visit the website #PULSEproject
