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The healthcare sphere is becoming more interconnected, intelligent and data driven. The management of healthcare data - and developments in the devices, technologies and systems used to obtain, interpret, store and access it - is a key theme for many researchers in healthcare and technology fields. Sensors and IoT devices are increasingly used to obtain better information about patients' health, machine learning and numerical optimization techniques are being deployed in interpreting medical information, and secure healthcare records and telemedicine approaches are needed to enable clinicians and patients to access data remotely. All these technological advances fall under the umbrella term of Healthcare 4.0.

Active and Assisted Living (AAL) systems aim at improving the quality of life and supporting independent and healthy living of older or impaired people by using a distributed network of sensors and actuators to create a ubiquitous technological layer, able to interact transparently with the users, observing and interpreting their actions and intentions, learning their preferences and adjusting the parameters of the system to improve their quality of life and work. This book provides a comprehensive review of the technologies and applications for AAL.

Advances in telemedicine technologies have offered clinicians greater levels of real-time guidance and technical assistance for diagnoses, monitoring, operations or interventions from colleagues based in remote locations. The topic includes the use of videoconferencing, mentorship during surgical procedures, or machine-to-machine communication to process data from one location by programmes running in another.

Affective computing is the study and development of systems and devices that can recognise human emotions. This can be done using sensing technologies and AI algorithms to process biological signals or facial images to identify the different affective states, such as happiness, anger, fear, surprise, sadness and disgust. This non-invasive technique has applications in healthcare such as emotional impairment detection, mental health assessment, emotional stress assessment, cognitive decline detection, attention deficit disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, neurological disorders, autism spectrum disorder, stress, anxiety or other behavioural assessment.

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly finding applications in the healthcare sector. Whether assisting a clinician to process an individual patient's data or helping administrators view hospital bed turnover, the volume and complexity of healthcare data is a compelling reason for the development of machine learning based tools to aid in its interpretation and use.

The expansion of telehealth services is enabling healthcare professionals to consult, diagnose, advise or perform tasks remotely, enabling them to treat more patients in their own homes or consult on cases on the other side of the world. The security of sensitive user information is critical to effective and efficient delivery of healthcare services. Artificial intelligence (AI) and blockchain technology are identified as key drivers of emerging telehealth systems, enabling efficient delivery of telehealth services to billions of patients globally. Specifically, AI facilitates the processing and analysis of complex telehealth data, and blockchain technology offers decentralised, transparent, traceable, reliable, trustful, and provable security to telehealth systems.