Analysis and Design of New Application Platforms for Mhealth: Ph.D. Thesis

There is no doubt that healthcare is a social-scale problem. Especially with the increase in elderly populations, the burden of healthcare is steadily increasing. Also, healthcare providers are faced with a shrinking professional caregiving force, which means there is a need to involve the patients' family members, friends and communities in the care activities. Thus, there is an urgent need to build collaborative care environments to maximize caregivers' efficacy, to improve the safety and quality of care by providing timely health information to professional healthcare providers, patients and patients' family members or friends.