In the past decade, studies revealed surprising results about the nervous system organization, sug-gesting that emotions and affective processes might play an even more important role in intelligence, health recovery and prevention, and overall well-being than ever suspected. These findings on emo-tions and affects from psychology, neuroscience and sociology call for innovation in information and communications technology. Objectives are among others
• enabling, and facilitating intelligent interpretation of affective health data;
• decision support systems for diagnostic, computer assisted health care;
• remote guidance and virtual reality applications in diagnostic and therapeutic procedures;
• privacy security and trust necessary for user acceptance of technologies;
• human-computer interfacing and usability engineering;
• novel patient modelling; and
• multimodal intelligent affective user interfaces.

The aim of the workshop is to encourage researchers from the affective computing to present novel is-sues and techniques related to affective computing in health and medicine. This workshop is intended to address different aspects related to the problems of accessing, exchanging, processing, filtering and making applications that bring affective computing and health together. The workshop will serve as a forum for the confluence of new and multidisciplinary ideas that will help to drive research in the areas of affective computing. Following this direction, we invite researchers and practioners from the area of affective computing to participate in this special session on affective computing in medicine and health.

The topics for this special session include, but are not limited to:
• Affective Computing in Tele-home Health
• Affective signal processing techniques in health
• Sensors, mobile devices and technologies for patient monitoring of affect-related events
• Socially intelligent communication robots in health care
• Context-awareness user modelling for healthcare
• Emotionally intelligent dialog systems in health care

Papers should be no more than 8 pages in IEEE standard format. Paper should be submitted elec-tronically in PDF format. Accepted papers will be published by IEEE. Prospective authors are ex-pected to present their papers at the workshop. Selected papers of the workshop will be published in a special issue of a journal (likely IEEE Trans. SMC-A).

The deadline for paper submission is 27th February 2010.

Inquiry of this special session can be sent to:
Special Session Chairs
Associate Prof. Rajiv Khosla
Dr. Kerstin Denecke
Research Centre for Computers, Communication and Social Innovation
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Victoria – 3086, Australia
Email: r.khosla@latrobe.edu.au and denecke@l3s.de