Requirements and design issues of ubiquitous community care systems for low-income pediatric asthma patients

Abstract

The social support in self-management has shown positive results in chronic condition treatment. In this paper, for low-income children with asthma, we propose ubiquitous community care system, and introduce requirements and some design issues for the system. We elicit sixteen requirements from analyzing interview with seven low-income families and six providers. Based on the requirements, we introduce design issues for the system: being ubiquitous, community care, regimen specific support, easiness of system usage, and privacy concerns. We also propose a centralized architecture for our ubiquitous community care system. We contend that our requirements and design issues for pediatric asthma management can be utilized in building the systems. Furthermore, our work can be applied to other chronic condition management system with minor modification. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.