GUEST EDITORIAL Guest editorial: advances in multimedia for health M. Shamim Hossain & Stefan Goebel & Abdulmotaleb El Saddik # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2014 Keywords Serious games . Cloud media for health . Multimedia for health care . Resource provisioning . Food categorization Today multimedia services and technologies play an important role in providing and managing e-health services to anyone, anywhere and anytime seamlessly. These services and technologies facilitate doctors and other health care professionals to have immediate access to healthcare information for efficient decision making as well as better treatment. Researchers are working in developing various multimedia tools, techniques and services to better support health initiatives. In particular, works in serious games for health and sports, cloud-based healthcare, real-time access of medical images and video are of great interest. With the rapid growth of mobile computing, cloud computing, and mobile healthcare technologies, today the healthcare domain is providing different kinds of services to patients. One of them is to use mobile cloud service that requires real-time computation in a server side especially for detection and classification of images from captured screen to detect patient abnormal events by using remote protocol in order to send to the relevant doctor though mobile devices. This remote protocol can help to send and receive the healthcare data via the internet with reliable quality of service (QoS), quality of experience (QoE) and low bandwidth. In this context, N.T. An, C-T. Huynh, B-K. Lee, C-S. Hong, and E-N. Huh presents “An Efficient Block Classification for Media Healthcare Service in Mobile Cloud Computing”. The authors focus on reducing redundant data for multimedia application services as well as Multimed Tools Appl DOI 10.1007/s11042-014-2202-0 M. S. Hossain (*) College of Computer and Information Sciences, King Saud University, PO Box 51178, Riyadh 11543, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia e-mail: mshossain@ksu.edu.sa S. Goebel Multimedia Communications Lab (KOM), Technical University Darmstadt, Darmstadt, Germany e-mail: stefan.goebel@kom.tu-darmstadt.de A. El Saddik School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Ottawa, 800 King Edward Avenue, Ottawa, On K1N 6N5, Canada e-mail: elsaddik@uottawa.ca