Using digital interactive television to promote healthcare and wellness inclusive services

Abstract

The potential of digital interactive television (iDTV) to promote original services, formats and contents that can be relevant to support personal health care and wellness of individuals, namely elderly people, has not been fully explored yet in the past. Therefore, in a context of rapid change of the technological resources, in which the distribution and presentation of content comes associated to new platforms (such as digital terrestrial TV and IPTV), it is important to identify the configurations that are being developed for interactive digital TV (iDTV) that may result in relevant outcomes within the field of healthcare and wellness, with the aim of offering complementarity to the existing services and contents made available today via the traditional means and media. This article describes and discusses the preliminary results of the first part of the research project iDTV-HEALTH: Inclusive services to promote health and wellness via digital interactive television. These first results suggest that iDTV solutions may represent a real contribution to bring healthcare and wellness to the target population, namely as a supplement to health services provision. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.