Howcare: A personal health cloud archive and care-partners' community

Abstract

Nowadays, most people care about their personal health, no matter mental or physical health in their daily life. They sustain and improve their health status with exercise, diet control, adopt good sleep habit, keep natural patterns on sleeping and bowel movement. These people need a tool for monitor and record long-termly their own health status. On the other hand, some people do not see they need to change their health related lifestyle to improve their health status until they are diagnosed with diseases. While he/she is sick, he/she also need to write down their health diary he/herself or the caregiver (most of them are the disadvantaged in their family) for the physician to monitor the illness. In this paper we proposed a social network service named HowCare, a caregiver based social support online community, with a personal health cloud archive and its unique designs with “HealthRank” algorithm to match caregiver's social network with correlated illness situation they face to. The aim of HowCare are, to help people keep their own health data on the cloud and allows patients or caregiver with the same disease to interact with each other, and through the social network and telehealth design, it will influence the patient's willingness to accept healthier life and improve health status.