This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2019, held in New York City, NY, USA, in October 2019. The 15 full papers and 5 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 24 submissions. They cover topics such as: e-health technology design; well-being technology; biomedical and health informatics; and smart environment technology. This work was published by Saint Philip Street Press pursuant to a Creative Commons license permitting commercial use. All rights not granted by the work's license are retained by the author or authors.