Healthcare4Life: a ubiquitous patient-centric telehealth system

Telehealth is a promising technology for improving the quality of care of seniors while using healthcare resources more effectively. Major obstacles to a more widespread use are the high initial costs and a vendor specific design, which makes it difficult and expensive to add new functionalities. Many existing systems are designed to manage diseases rather than prevent them and do not address the social and psychological needs of the patient. The increasing numbers of seniors going online to look for health related information indicates that Internet is the right medium to deliver health-related services to patients. We present Healthcare4Life, a novel patient-centric, web-based telehealth system developed using Web 2.0 technologies which allow integration of third party health applications and provides social support to its users.