A Virtual Community Design for Home-Based Chronic Disease Healthcare

The internet based social network has been applied to serve many social functions, such as democratic decision making, knowledge sharing, educa‐ tion, and healthcare. In this paper, we provide a prototype of virtual community designed for home-based chronic diseases healthcare. We studied the concept “community” from the activity theory model in order to design the prototype with a solid theoretical base. Then we conducted a questionnaire from healthcare recipients and interviewed healthcare providers to gather the requirements for the design of the community. With some user stories we described the requirements as use cases for our design and a conceptual prototype is built based on the requirements. This virtual community servers as a shared platform for all the stakeholders who are engaged in the healthcare activity. With this shared community platform, the interoperability problems of current healthcare systems can be moderate