Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) provide increasingly powerful tools improving the delivery of basic services, as acknowledged by the United Nations Development Programme. Web-Service Technology (WST) is an example of these technologies. WST has emerged and successfully developed as an implementation of the Service-Oriented Architecture. All this rapidly developing technology has an impact on health and healthcare services. Advances in ICT are leading to a reduction in both the cost and size of sensors, monitors and other medical equipment. Advances in WST (in particular) are allowing for the development and use of powerful automated intelligent systems that adequately support healthcare processes. Relevant technological trends concern increasingly pervasive sensing networks, higher processing power and the ability to transfer data more quickly through both wired and wireless systems. We witness thus the emergence of a new technology-research-application-related area: the area of e-Health. Particularly driven by this (general) research focus, we are interested in the development and use of e-Health services as well as in their related technologies. Such services could actually be executed by ICT applications, being provided on a global scale, through distributed computing environments. e-Health services could hence bring tremendous support to medical doctors and nurses, by allowing them, for example, to realize 24-7 remote patient monitoring (vital-sign-monitoring), and this could make care-provisioning more accessible to broad societal circles – healthcare cost would go down if automated systems are substituted for human healthcare workers.

Hence, the Second International Workshop on e-Health Services and Technologies –EHST’08 fundamentally focuses on e-Health services and their related technology, with a particular stress on the modeling of complex technology-driven service-provisioning systems. In approaching e-Services though, we are mainly concerned with Tele-Monitoring and Tele-Treatment, as two essential directions of supporting healthcare through advanced technology. By Tele-Monitoring we mean the monitoring of the patient’s condition (including the monitoring of vital signs such as blood sugar and blood pressure), supported by technology systems. By Tele-Treatment we mean performing some forms of treatment from distance, for example through actuators.

These two research directions essentially concern the mobility aspect because both Tele-Monitoring and Tele-Treatment are realized from distance, through advanced mobile devices. Open questions however are reliability on mobile technology ‘any time any place’ and the operation of devices and batteries in ‘real’ conditions. The mentioned Mobility aspect points also to the desired capability of e-Health systems to adequately react on changes in their environment, referred to as context awareness. We acknowledge thus that technology-driven healthcare systems could only be really useful if they are context-aware. Finally, if putting together a number of e-Health facilities in the patient’s environment we could achieve powerful support, by providing the patient with a complex and constant healthcare service, while keeping him/her in his/her own environment. All these issues are connected (nevertheless) to important related concerns, such as security and privacy, since to provide powerful remote support patients would only make adequate value if patients’ data is treated in a secure and privacy-sensitive way.