Social networking healthcare

The world of “Social Networking”, a cultural phenomenon of recent years, has evolved an application paradigm, Instant Messaging (IM), into a feature rich, highly interactive and context sensitive service delivery environment. Terms such as buddy lists, presence and IM-bots have emerged as building blocks for services that significantly enhance the user experience. Mapping this paradigm to healthcare can deliver a highly innovative communication platform for information sharing, monitoring and care plan execution. Buddy lists become care groups, presence becomes patient context (e.g. blood sugar level) and IM-bots become E-healthcare services, capable of delivering appropriate contextual information to care groups. This paper outlines the benefit of such a crossover and proposes a component based architecture to meet the ever evolving health care needs of society.