On behalf of the organizing committee, we would like to welcome you to the 21th International Conference on e-Health Networking, Application & Services - Healthcom2019 - held on 14-16 October 2019 in the city of Bogotá, Republic of Colombia.

We are very glad to have the opportunity to take part in the organization of a conference that gathers researchers and professionals from academia and industry to share experiences and new ideas in such a dynamic area as eHealth technologies.

As general chairs of this conference, it is our great honor to organize such a high-level conference for the first time in Colombia.

IEEE Healthcom is the flagship conference of the IEEE Communications Society in the domain of eHealth. It is fully sponsored by the IEEE Comsoc and technically sponsored by the IEEE ComSoc Colombia Chapter.

We aim to continue to develop an active research community in the domain of application of communication technologies to find out new solutions to improve health services and applications, offering safe, comfortable, inexpensive, and reliable solutions to support the increase in life expectancy. Information Technologies are the enabling technologies for telemedicine applications in remote and rural locations, but also for continuous health monitoring out of hospital, at home, and during sports, leisure or professional activities. The topics of the conference are broadly covering the applications of IT in Medicine and Healthcare: Network/Communications Infrastructures and Architectures for Healthcare, Medical Imaging systems, connected biomedical sensors and physiological signal monitoring systems, Body sensor networks, Wearables and Medical IoT Interoperability and Intelligence, Medical data mining and decision systems for health and epidemiologic interventions, ICT-enabled personal health system , Connectivity for the Digital Citizen in an Immersive Environment, Security and privacy on eHealth…

But after two decades of intensive technical developments in these fields, some more fundamental questions arise now that the digitization of our health becomes an evidence. Mainly questions about privacy of our personal data. Also about the revolution of Healthcare delivery organization with major consequences for the activity of Health professionals. Moreover, the digital industry in health becomes a driving force for the whole IT industry. Healthcare is becoming one of the largest industries in most nations, with an increasing part of their GDP, as well as one of the Sustainable Development Goals. Health IT will probably be recognized the main industrial activity of the 21st century.

Growing opportunities for innovators in the areas of sensor technology the Internet of Things, Robotics, e-health, m-Health, Cloud Computing and emerging technologies such as 5G, Big Data, SDNs, NFV, Precision and Personalized Medicine. However, the integration of innovative technology into society is associated with social technological alignment and societal acceptance of technology which requires sound solutions with regards to ethical, legal, social and security challenges.

Healthcom first started in Sydney, Australia in 1999 under the impulsion of Prof. Pradeep Ray from New South Wales University.

This year 2019, we are welcome in the city of Bogota.

The conference also promotes a social program to offer participants the opportunity to visit the city of Bogota, the Gold Museum, its surroundings and explore Colombia - "Land of Sabrosura".

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1999	Sydney	Australia	Pradeep Ray
2000	Sydney	Australia	Pradeep Ray
2001	L'Aquila	Italy	Frederic Patricelli
2002	Nancy	France	Jean-Pierre Thomese and Claude Godart
2003	Santa Monica	USA	Samir Chatterjee and Swamy Laxminarayana
2004	Odawara	Japan	Isao Nakajima
2005	Busan	South Korea	Heung-Kook Choi
2006	New Dehli	India	Saroj Mishra
2007	Taipei	Taiwan	Fei-Pei Lai
2008	Singapore	Singapore	Jit Biswas
2009	Sydney	Australia	Pradeep Ray
2010	Lyon	France	Norbert Noury
2011	Columbia	USA	Chi-Ren Shyu
2012	Beijing	China	Jian Song
2013	Lisbon	Portugal	Joel Rodrigues
2014	Natal	Brazil	Augusto V. Neto and José N. de Souza
2015	Boston	USA	Joel Rodrigues
2016	Munich	Germany	Christoph Thuemmler and Chunxue Bai
2017	Dalian	China	Chengsheng Pan and Lei Shu
2018	Ostrava	Chzec Republic	prof. Norbert Noury and Martin Černý

Sincerely,

Prof. Andrés Navarro, IEEE Comsoc Colombia Chapter Chair, Universidad Icesi, Colombia

Prof. Carlos Lozano, Universidad de Los Andes, Colombia
Prof. Joel Rodrigues, Federal University of Piauí, Brazil