Giovanni Rinaldi, Bologna University, Bologna, Italy Marco Manca*, Maastricht University, Maastricht, Netherlands Antonio Vittorino Gaddi, Bologna University, Bologna, Italy Track: Practice Presentation Topic: Building virtual communities and social networking applications for patients and consumers Presentation Type: Oral presentation Submission Type: Single Presentation Building: MECC Room: 0.9 Athens Date: 2010-11-30 01:00 PM – 02:30 PM Last modified: 2010-09-21

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In recent years, in reaction to the dramatic aging of our populations and the public expense burden related to the health issues of the older tiers of society, several ICT projects have been realized with the aim of avoiding elderly solitude, promoting wellbeing, monitoring chronic diseases at home by using telemedicine devices.
An analysis of the nature of this challenge isolates this requirements:
• Healthcare and social-care are closely related for elderly;
• Elderly (at home) needs a continuum of care and not an episodic approach like several specialized applications do;
• Different agencies take part in elderly care (health organizations, social departments, volunteer associations); they have their own responsibilities, organizations and diverse information systems;
• the “little” world of elderly is made up of the trust relationships with doctors, social workers, family, friends, parishes, volunteers organizations.
In order to overcome the traditional eCare project scheme, which frequently led to build “data silos” interconnected with proprietary mechanism; and with the goal of responding to the aforementioned needs, we built a federative platform for the elderly living in Bologna (Italy). Each elder is provided at home with a simple device managed by a remote control; this is connected to the TV and to a VoIP telephone; elderly suffering of cardiopathic disease are monitored with Bluetooth easy-to-use telemedicine devices. We think that the federative nature of the platform can support the Medicine2.0 observations:
• Portalling: the publication, syndication and organisation of contents;
• Indexing: the management of identifiers, tokens, authentications and relationships;
• Switching: the process coordination within and across boundaries ensuring that sequences of events and transactions are managed;
The key concepts of the federation are:
• Publish and subscribe: this is the concept of making one’s own information accessible to stakeholders which have necessity to access; the communication of personal information is an active action based on recognition by the parties of the need to inform and the desire to share and in which the subject of information is an informed and active participant;
• Messaging: it is not the vehicle for building or maintain data base, but it is the way for alerting and communicating with the user;
• Signaling: it is the observation of the events in the federation. It produces marketing (for profit and no-profit organizations): agencies and volunteers organizations can produce new services on the basis of end users’ behaviours and usage;
The services implemented are described by the light of the user involvement in his/her own health care:
1. Social networks animated by volunteers;
2. Profiling engine: it has the aim to drive stakeholders in the description of user scenarios and search information for caring elderly;
3. Electronic Health and Social Record build by stakeholders but accessed by patients; it is provided a sort of user spaces with the following characteristics:
a. Questionnaires; elderly is driven to compile questionnaires about social state or chronic disease;
b. Observational and Narrative Personal speech diary;
c. Visualization of data from devices;
d. Personal services Booking and social appointments.