Guest Editorial Health Engineering Driven by the Industry 4.0 for Aging Society

Abstract

The aging of population has been recognized as one of the top grand global challenges. Age-related diseases such as neurodegenerative diseases, cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases, and psychological diseases have become the primary killers of human and consume the major portion of healthcare resources due to the long course of disease and large patient base. Powered by the technologies originated from manufacturing industries driven by the fourth revolution of industry (Industry 4.0), the fourth revolution in healthcare technologies (Healthcare 4.0) is also happening as envisioned by Pang et al. [item 1) in the Appendix]. In the Healthcare 4.0, vast amount of cyber and physical systems (CPS) are closely combined through the Internet of Things (IoT), intelligent sensing, big data analytics, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, automatic control, and autonomous execution and robotics to create not only digitalized healthcare products and technologies but also digitalized healthcare services and enterprises. Driven by these mega trends, the Health Engineering (i.e., the applications of engineering principles and convenience approaches to solve problems in health) is emerging as a new interdisciplinary field of research and development. This convergence research model provides a blueprint for addressing society’s most pressing health challenges and leads to a revolutionized healthcare system that enables the participation of all people for the early prediction and prevention of diseases, so that preemptive treatment can be delivered to realize personalized, precision, pervasive, and patient-centralized healthcare,