Abstract
Introduction
Welcome to a new issue of the Journal of Smart Cities and Society. Here we include three contributions to the field, considering: smart cities mobility analysis, smart healthcare, and smart carer assistants:
“Analysis of human mobility behavior in smart cities and smart environments: A systematic literature review and taxonomy” by Carlos Eduardo Liedtke Borges, Jorge Luis Victoria Barbosa and Jorge Arthur Schneider Aranda, provides a strategically important analysis of human mobility behavior covering a variety of scenarios (including urban mobility, public transport, points and regions of interest, ridesharing, bike-sharing, traffic analysis, driving behavior, electric vehicle charging stations planning, mobility on demand, and crowd analysis), providing an analysis of the infrastructure and algorithms currently used to perform these analysis, as well as a list of challenges to be addressed to enable progress in this area.
“Digital health applications – A digital solution for the health of the future?” by Miriam Ines Füßer, Thomas Ostermann, Jan Ehlers and Gregor Hohenberg, examines the possibilities of digital health, including an interesting consideration of how evidence-based health apps are being considered within the German health system, with their current advantages and challenges and a critical assessment of the sector at a global level.
“Enhancing healthcare with intelligent environments: Integrating medical knowledge into GPT for advanced medical personal chatbots” by Primož Kocuvan, Matic Zadobovšek, and Matjaž Gams, reports on a bilateral project involving organizations from Slovenia and Italy, which aims at trialing the integration of conventional resources and national health information platforms with AI supported help in the form of a personal medical chatbot connecting to home environments. This development aims at reducing the burden on healthcare professionals, supporting multilingual interactions, and has shown promising initial results.
The Editorial Team of this journal expects the contributions included in this issue will provide new tools to address some of the many challenges ahead to realize this societal paradigm shift and inspires and guide other colleagues in this developing community to further innovate in this sector.
We encourage all sectors of society to engage in this technical conversation as our view of this area as a multidisciplinary one which will require the input of various different professions and different levels of involvement within urban environments to produce effective innovation.