1. Medical Evidence for importance of social interaction in healthcare
It's now generally accepted that social support is extremely important in healthcare, particularly in diseases such as cardiovascular disease and cancer.
"Social support has been associated with decreased cardiac mortality in both men and women, better physical and psychological status of cardiac patients and their caregivers, and better adherence to treatment routine"
Bjornsdottir, G. Online social support for individuals concerned with heart
disease: observing gender differences. Proceedings of AMIA '99. Avaliable
at www.amia.org/pubs/symposia/D005396.PDF
Infant birth weight is positively affected by amount and number of types of social support mother receives during pregnancy.
Feldman P, Dunkel-Schetter C, Sandman, CA and Wadhwa PD. Social support during
pregnancy can affect fetal growth and birth weight. Psychosomatic Medicine
2000:9/10.
2. Current social health/wellness care
A basic equation: one trades personal information (and a little privacy) for the support and positive competition provided by a social group. Works for...
- Weight Watchers
- Alcoholics Anonymous
- Narcotics Anonymous
- Anorexia/bulemia support groups
- etc.
3. Current technologies: newsgroups, webpages and mailing lists
Current electronic social support networks rely on mailing lists, webpages, and newsgroups.
Useful, but...
- Generally not "always on"
- Privacy questions
- Connection to healthcare provider is only via the patient
- Not that that's necessarily a bad thing...
- ...But advice doesn't always take into all the factors that a healthcare professional would.(Robinson et al. 1998)
An interesting note: online forums for social healthcare support are statistically used more and seems to be more useful to women than men. (see Bjornsdottir 2001 for various refs)
4. Future enabling technologies: Ubicomp and wireless
Rather than spend time on this, I'm going to uncreatively assert that it's currently cheap to get a small amount of data to a device, it's only slightly more expensive to get data from a device, and that both are going to get cheaper and easier.
5. Some design solutions from Ambient Devices
- Health Dashboard
- Pollen Meter
5a.
Some Design Solutions: Health Dashboard
The Health Dashboard is a prototype information display device. Simple clock-like
hands display various parameters environmental factors such as air quality and
pollen forecasts, body metrics like blood pressure and peak flow, and behaviors
that influence health like steps walked today. This is just a design prototype:
the problems of how to measure and track these things is difficult and unsolved
to date.
5b. Some Design Solutions: Pollen Meter
This is a mockup of the LCD; the actual current prototype uses phyical hands,
similar to the dashboard. SDI International provides pollen counts by zipcode
for the United States. Each meter has a unique address. The meter location is
registered by calling an 800-number or visiting a website, and then the appropriate
location-specific data is sent to that address from that point on.
6. A design problem: Asthma in Springfield, MA
The Asthma Project Working Group: medical and scientific experts on air quality from John Hopkins, MGH, Harvard Public Health, the EPA, and other researchers at MIT. The aim of the group is to deploy in-home air quality sensor units, and complimentary devices for displaying both in-home data (second-hand smoke) and larger, neighborhood-sized air quality sampling information (black carbon from diesel buses and major highways). Initially this study is concentrating on a neighborhood in Springfield, MA, which has the highest asthma morbidity rate in the state.
http://web.mit.edu/crcp/asthma.html
Question: How to integrate the ability to sense and provide data specifically for the patient and their household, in a way that improves quality of life and health?