Call for Papers

Information and communications technologies have progressed rapidly in this millennium for people to communicate and exchange information using multimedia (speech, video/image, text) and the same has extended to internet of things (IoT) and machine-to-machine and machine-to-human communication. Propelled by the explosive growth in IoT, this trend is only going to accelerate in the years to come with new inventions in the area of human-IoT interaction technologies to deliver powerful engaging and intuitive experiences. But, these developments have remained confined to only the sensing and transmission of aural and optical information in the digital domain through the use of microphone, camera, speaker and display devices. However, the ability to integrate the other three sensory features, namely, olfactory (smell), gustatory (taste) and tactile (touch) in information transfer and replication to deliver Star-Wars-like "being there" experience are still far from reality. Human bond communication (HBC) is a novel concept that incorporates all five sensory information from sensing to digitization to transmission and replication at the receiver to allow more expressive, engaging, realistic and holistic information between humans, and in some cases between humans and machines (M2H) or IoTs.

This Feature Topic (FT) solicits articles that explore different aspects of HBC, IoTs for HBC and the interplay between these two fields, M2M and M2H, which also include the other three human sensory information (olfactory, tactile and gustatory) in addition to aural and optical sensors. Although the FT invites papers on research topics on sensing and replication, the focus of these papers should be on the ICT angle in this regards and on how information is encoded, transmitted and decoded reliably and securely in a world which would increasingly become multi-sensory.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Communication aspects of biometric extending to all five senses
• Smart body area network
• Brain-to-brain communication
• Brain-to-brain interface, Brain-to-computer interface, Computer-to-brain interface
• Gustatory, tactile, olfactory sensing and replication
• Human bond communication
• Human bond communication(s) interface
• Human unwelt expansion
• Interplay between HBC and IoT
• Invasive (i.e. bionic) approaches
• Physical world augmentation (PWA) through the inclusion of all five senses
• Privacy, security, and reliability in HBC
• Sensory augmentation, sensory substitution
• Wearable(s) with non-aural and non-optical sensor
• Wireless body area network
• Sensor encoding, transmission and decoding

Submission Guidelines

Manuscripts should conform to the standard format as indicated in the Information for Authors section of the Manuscript Submission Guidelines.

All manuscripts to be considered for publication must be submitted by the deadline through Manuscript Central. Select the "February 2019/Multi-Sensory Human Bond Communication" topic from the drop-down menu of Topic/Series titles.

Important Dates

Manuscript Submission Deadline: July 1, 2018
Decision Notification: November 1, 2018
Final Manuscript Due: December 1, 2018
Publication Date: February 2019

Guest Editors

Sudhir Dixit
Basic Internet Foundation, USA

Seshadri Mohan
University of Arkansas, USA

Ramjee Prasad
Aarhus University, Denmark

Hiroshi Harada
Kyoto University, Japan