Sustainable Software for Health

Dear Colleagues,

A Special Issue entitled “Sustainable Software for Health” is being organised in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, which is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed, open-access journal in the area of environmental health sciences and engineering. More information about the journal can be found on https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph.

Software is everywhere. It is at the core of organizations of all types and sizes: transport, banking, communications, etc. In particular, the software is present in a wide variety of devices and systems in the health field. Given the enormous criticality of this domain, it is necessary to apply software engineering methods, techniques, and tools to develop software products for health that meet the highest quality standards in the industry.

Our planet is vulnerable and its resources are limited. For this reason, it is of paramount importance to follow the principles of sustainable development to guarantee the future of new generations. This necessarily includes software systems, given their ubiquity and impact on the environment, especially in relation to electricity consumption. This can be addressed from two perspectives: (i) make the process of software development more sustainable (i.e., sustainability in software) and (ii) have a positive impact on sustainability through the software itself (i.e., sustainability by software).

Nowadays, we have to move forward in aligning the two ideas presented above. Health software should be created by meeting stringent quality requirements, both functionally and structurally (e.g., privacy, security, robustness, and maintainability). Sustainability can also be considered as a software quality. More effort is needed to progress towards the development of sustainable software for health.

Thus, this Special Issue is seeking methodological or technological manuscripts offering new insights about sustainable software for health in the two perspectives aforementioned (sustainability by software and sustainability in software). Therefore, papers on the following topics (although not limited to them) are welcome to be submitted:

• Descriptions of development, implementation, validation, or evaluation of sustainable software for health.
• Analysis of the relations between sustainability and other software quality requirements (privacy, security, usability, maintainability, etc.)
• Application of sustainability by design in software development for digital health.
• Sustainable software development and management methodologies for digital health, including agile methods and DevOps practices.
• Secondary and tertiary studies such as bibliometric studies, systematic literature reviews, mapping studies, scoping reviews, meta-analyses in any area related to sustainable software for health.
• Empirical studies (case studies, experiments, and surveys) applied to any subject related to sustainable software for health.

Dr. José Luis Fernández-Alemán
Dr. Juan Manuel Carrillo de Gea
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 250 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for assessment.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health is an international peer-reviewed open access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2500 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.