Salud!: An open infrastructure for developing and deploying health self-management applications

Abstract

Health self-management strategies have been shown to improve health outcomes and decrease the cost of health care for individuals living with chronic illness. Personal health informatics applications, which allow individuals to track and review personal health-related information have, in turn, been shown to improve health self-management outcomes by supporting learning and reflection. We identify the need for a software infrastructure that facilitates the creation and deployment of such applications and describe our progress in developing and making available such an infrastructure, which we call Salud! We discuss how the design of Salud! follows from key strategies and results in the health self-management literature, and how its application programming interface (API) and related services can be leveraged by other researchers wishing to build a personal health informatics applications. Finally, we describe our own health self-management application that we are building using Salud!