U-Health in Korea: Opportunities and Challenges

Ubiquitous technology is expected to be the next hero who will rapidly change the world. This wave is also flowing to the healthcare field, and various Korean healthcare organizations are eager to adopt these technologies, calling ubiquitous healthcare. However, it is difficult to utilize these new technologies because there are so many relevant stakeholders with different views and interests. In order to analyze such a complicated situation, this study uses actor- network theory (ANT) which is considered a good tool to understand social complexity. Because it stresses the heterogeneity of network, the construction and maintenance of networks made up of both human and non human actors. This paper offers current healthcare issues in Korea, a brief introduction of actor-network theory and suggests that they might be usefully incorporated into to describe ubiquitous healthcare innovation.