Managing first response medical aids with an altruistic Web application

The use of the Web as a mean to express and satisfy users personal needs is widespread. However, this novel way to exploit online applications to give voice to any opinion has rapidly degenerated; now, the Web 2.0 is more and more recognized as a tool to foster “human egocentrism”. Nevertheless, many experts assert that contents produced and distributed through Web 2.0 technologies can be exploited also for “altruistic” purposes. In this paper, we show how contents created through a selfish use of the Web 2.0 can be recycled into “altruistic” applications for pervasive healthcare services and first response medical aids. The idea is that of trading the online advertisement of doctors and healthcare workers with their availability to be located and their agreement to intervene in case of emergency. The key to technically build such pervasive applications is based on an approach to profile patients, doctors and their location, employed together with communication protocols able to spread information over heterogeneous networks.