Evaluation of web 2.0 technologies for developing online telehealth systems

Telehealth and telecare applications are a promising technology for improving the quality of care while using healthcare resources more effectively. Major obstacles to a more widespread use are the high initial costs and a vendor specific design, which makes it difficult and expensive to add new functionalities. The Internet offers an opportunity to make telehealth applications more accessible, while also adding social aspects and the opportunity for third-party developers to add content. A preliminary user study confirmed that elderly are interested in such an application, and provided guidelines for the user interface design and required functionalities. In this paper, we evaluate technologies for developing online telehealth platforms, and present a first prototype which is extendable and has social networking capabilities. Our results show that a combination of open web standards such as OpenSocial and a CMS such as Drupal represents a suitable design. We illustrate the capabilities of our design and prototype by developing a memory game, which can be submitted by third party developers, similar to a Facebook application, and which utilises the social context of our telehealth application.