Accessible Telehealth - Leveraging Consumer-level Technologies and Social Networking Functionalities for Senior Care Jaspaljeet Singh Dhillon and Burkhard C. Wunsche¨ and Christof Lutteroth Department of Computer Science, University of Auckland, New Zealand
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[email protected] Abstract— The increasing cost of healthcare represents a our framework for a novel telehealth system and Section V serious challenge to most developed countries. Telehealth has and VI explain its design and implementation, respectively. been widely promoted as a technology to make healthcare more We evaluate our prototype in Section VII and conclude the effective and affordable. However, current telehealth systems suffer from vendor lock-in and high cost, and are designed paper in Section VIII with a summary of our contributions for managing chronic diseases, rather than preventing them. and future work. In this paper we evaluate technologies for supporting senior health consumers. Based on this we propose a framework for a II. CONSUMER-LEVEL HEALTH INFORMATICS novel telehealth system overcoming many of the shortcomings APPLICATIONS of existing technologies. The new system is web-based, has a Facebook-like plug-in architecture for adding new health The most common consumer-level health informatics ap- applications, and incorporates social networking functionalities. plications are telehealth systems, health record management We discuss the challenges in implementing the system, and systems, health information websites, and exergames. summarize a user study evaluating the system. Our results Telehealth systems consist of vital signs measurement de- demonstrate that health consumers have a positive view of this vices and a patient station, which allows interaction between new telehealth technology, and that it can positively change the attitude of users towards their health.