Mobile computing tools as a medium to educate and empower people with chronic conditions

Abstract

A wearable health care monitoring system is proposed. Constant health monitoring can improve the patient's quality of life for various health conditions such as diabetes and obesity, the focus being on prevention rather than treatment. To achieve this individuals and patients need to be empowered and educated with the use of proactive mobile computing tools and technologies such as mobile phones, PDAs, Bluetooth and WAP. Integrating these tools provides a transparent way of monitoring, analysing and modelling their metabolic performance and allows patients to become more responsible for the management of their health conditions. © 2007 Springer.