Wellbeing as a proxy for a mHealth study

Abstract

The quantified-self is a key enabler for mHealth. We propose that a wellbeing remote monitoring scenario can act as a suitable proxy for mHealth monitoring by the use of an online social network (OSN). We justify our position by discussing the parallelism in the scenario between purpose-driven wellbeing and mHealth scenarios. The similarity between these two scenarios in terms of privacy and data sharing is discussed. By using such a proxy, some of the legal and ethical complexity can be removed from experimentation on new technologies and systems for mHealth. This enables technology researchers to carry out investigation and focus on testing new technologies, system interactions as well as security and privacy in healthcare in pre- clinical experiments, without loss of context. The analogy between two purpose-driven scenarios, i.e. fitness monitoring in wellbeing scenario and remote monitoring in mHealth, is discussed in terms of a practical example: we present a prototype using a wellbeing device -- Fitbit -- and an open source online social media platform (OSMP) -- Diaspora.