Defining design opportunities of healthcare in the perspective of digital social innovation

Abstract

Digital Social Innovation is a relative new term, which describes new IT-enabled solutions that simultaneously meet a social need and enhance capacity to act. It includes the challenge of giving a clear identity to the digital essence that assist our way of knowing, and living. It is an emergent stream of social innovation research and a response to growing social, environmental and demographic challenges. There is great potential to exploit digital network effects both in social innovation activity and in new services and approaches that generate social value. By the development of the internet, especially the popular of social media, such as face book, twitter, Wechat, QQ and so on, the way of people interact is changed a lot. And this kind of platform is a new way of social innovation in healthcare field, but we still need to do more research on this field to make it more reasonable. In order to explore and define design opportunities related to healthcare field, an interdisciplinary course “Smart Healthcare” and workshops which combined the smart technology with social innovation were carried out. The sub-topic of the workshops related to the aged community, medical system. The paper addresses the result of the course and workshops by analyzing the case studies and defining design opportunities in the healthcare field. This could be a very preliminary step to understand how the social problems can be unbarred by digital social innovation approach.