Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies

This book contains the refereed proceedings with the best papers of the Second International Joint Conference on Biomedical Engineering Systems and Technologies (BIOSTEC 2009), held in Porto, Portugal, in January 2009. The 29 revised full papers presented together with two invited papers were carefully reviewed and selected out of 380 paper submissions. BIOSTEC was composed of three co-located conferences: BIODEVICES (International Conference on Biomedical Electronics and Devices) focus on aspects related to electronics and mechanical engineering, especially equipments and materials inspired from biological systems and/or addressing biological requirements. Monitoring devices, instrumentation sensors and systems, biorobotics, micro-nanotechnologies and biomaterials are some of the technologies addressed at this conference. BIOSIGNALS (International Conference on Bio-inspired Systems and Signal Processing) is a forum for those studying and using models and techniques inspired from or applied to biological systems. A diversity of signal types can be found in this area, including image, audio and other biological sources of information. The analysis and use of these signals is a multidisciplinary area including signal processing, pattern recognition and computational intelligence techniques, amongst others. HEALTHINF (International Conference on Health Informatics) promotes research and development in the application of information and communication technologies (ICT) to healthcare and medicine in general and to the specialized support to persons with special needs in particular. Databases, networking, graphical interfaces, intelligent decision support systems and specialized programming languages are just a few of the technologies currently used in medical informatics. Mobility and ubiquity in healthcare systems, standardization of technologies and procedures, certification, privacy are some of the issues that medical informatics professionals and the ICT industry in general need to address in order to further promote ICT in healthcare.