Role of social networking in patient monitoring and E-healthcare

The rapid developments in the network communication systems, sensor technologies, and web engineering have enabled the advent of social networking. E-healthcare is one of the compelling areas where remote interaction of patients and medical community has become a part of medical practice. The wireless communication and availability of WiFi enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs) have extended the domain to Anywhere, Anytime. Hence the physicians, doctors, patients and hospitals are integrated in a social network without any limitation of physical location. Virtual hospitals offer services environment to patients at home, office and during the travel etc. It is extremely useful when monitoring is required for an indisposed-patient due to old age, post treatment condition or in emergency scenarios. The infrastructure-less support to mobile nodes has a lot of applications in war, emergency, ambulatory cases or far flung areas. The peer nodes connect to the internet service provider node to enable medical services such as recording clinical data measurements, offering medical advice, receiving medical reports and medical prescriptions etc. The knowledge based systems; cyber domain information interchange, data management, security and ubiquitous cloud for telemedicine to enable virtual hospital services have been discussed. The wireless sensor networks for disaster management or emergency assistance with the help of infrastructure-less communication and role of social networking has been presented. The design and development initiatives and projects at hand in these areas have been briefly described.