What is it about?
Remote monitoring is an essential part of future mHealth systems for the delivery of personal and pervasive healthcare, especially to allow the collection of personal bio-data outside clinical environments. Yet, by its very nature, it presents considerable challenges: it will be a highly distributed task, requiring collection of bio-data for a myriad of cources, to be marshalled at the clinical site via secure communication channels. To address these challenges, we propose the use of an online social media platform (OSMP) as a key component of a near-future remote health monitoring system.
Featured Image
Photo by National Cancer Institute on Unsplash
Why is it important?
By exploiting existing infrastructure, initial costs can be reduced, at the same time as allowing fast and flexible application development. An OSMP would have user benefits also: patients and healthcare professionals can be presented with familiar interfaces, while application developers can work with a set of technologies that are widely used and well-known. Internet-based access also helps to provide wide-ranging connectivity for mobile applications. Additionally, the use of a social media context allows existing social interactions within the healthcare regime to be modelled within a carer network, working in harmony with, and providing support for, existing relationships and interactions between patients and healthcare professionals.
Perspectives
We take the position that the use of an open source OSMP platform would allow flexible application devel- opment and modifications, reduce the costs of systems, and allow fine-grained control of security & privacy for a future mHealth system. We believe that the use of OSMPs would enable the collection of patient- generated data for personal and ubiquitous healthcare in a future mHealth scenario, exploiting existing infras- tructure to reduce costs, improve application develop- ment and allow scalability of solutions.
Prof Saleem N Bhatti
University of St Andrews
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Remote Health Monitoring Using Online Social Media, ICST Transactions on Ubiquitous Environments, November 2014, Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering (ICST),
DOI: 10.4108/ue.1.3.e2.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
