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Health behaviour change programs that utilise IT-based delivery have great potential to improve health. Whilst more static Web 1.0 technologies have been somewhat effective, they often failed to promote longer-term user engagement required for greater health promotion impact. With Web 2.0 technologies, however, there is potential for greater engagement and retention, through allowing individuals to determine how information is generated, modified, and shared collaboratively. The WALK 2.0 study utilised a Web 2.0-based platform to engage participants in health behaviour change aimed at increasing physical activity levels. The program included two trials: (1) a three-arm randomised controlled trial (RCT) that compared the effectiveness of Web 2.0, Web 1.0, and paper-based logbook interventions; and (2) a real-world randomised ecological trial (RET) that compared a Web 2.0 and Web 1.0 intervention. The aim of this paper is not to focus on the research trial results per se, but rather the success factors and challenges in both the RCT and RET. Both the RCT and RET demonstrated successful outcomes, with greater improvements in physical activity for the Web 2.0 groups. A range of challenges, however, were identified in designing, implementing, and evaluating such interventions. These include IT-based intervention development within a research context, the ability to establish a self-sustaining online community, the rapid pace of change in web-based technology and implications for trial design, the selection of best outcome measures for ecological trials, and managing engagement, non-usage and study attrition in real-world trials. Future research and developments in this area must look to broader research designs that allow for the ever-changing IT-user landscape and behaviour, and greater reliance on development and testing in real-world settings.

Health Smart Homes aim to assist the health and well-being of elderly people through digital technologies, by helping them to continue their daily living activities with safety and independence. This paper presents a landscape review to evaluate the effectiveness and feasibility of Health Smart Home technologies for advancing autonomy and quality of life from the perspectives of elderly users. The review was derived from an initial search of peer reviewed journals from three different data sources: PubMed (3808 papers), Google Scholar (7987 papers), and Scopus (595 papers). Of these, fourteen articles eventually met the inclusion criteria for the review and were subjected to further data extraction and quality assessment. The aim of this paper is to identify the perceptions of users by reviewing Health Smart Homes functions, services, benefits and implementation. Health Smart Homes could provide more opportunities to deliver IT-based health services by proactively monitoring and customizing the user environment, to the userâĂŹs needs and preferences.

Health Smart Homes provide various forms of assisted living support, by monitoring the activities and health status of their occupants to generate flows of information and sometimes interventions involving the occupants and their careers. Technologies of varying complexity must be combined to produce the underlying Health Smart Home system, and processing of the resulting data may require methods of varying sophistication. These aspects have been well studied, but no widely-adopted approaches for practical implementation of systems or systematic processing of data have been developed. Also, the integration of Health Smart Home services with the overall health care system has not been regularized. This paper identifies and categorizes the emerging high-level challenges beyond those in the basic technical and algorithmic spaces. These challenges will influence future directions for Health Smart Homes and their wider adoption and integration with health systems.

Poor adherence to medication can lead to negative health outcomes and increased financial burdens. We present a literature review on electronic medication reminders used for medication adherence in self care settings, to identify current and possible future trends. A structured PubMed search based on extracted MeSH terms provided a total of 45 publications which were identified as most relevant. Three main categories of electronic solutions were identified: mobile phone reminders, in-home electronic reminder devices, and portable reminder devices.

Many mobile health (mHealth) projects, typically deploying pilot or small scale implementations, have been undertaken in developing world settings and reported with a widely varying range of claims being made on their effectiveness and benefits. As a result, there is little evidence for which aspects of such projects lead to successful outcomes. This paper describes a literature review of papers from PubMed undertaken to identify strong contributions to execution and evaluation of mHealth projects in developing world settings, and suggests a template for classifying the main success factors to assist with collating evidence in the future.

Remote provision of supportive mechanisms for preventive health is a fast-growing area in eHealth. Web-based interventions have been suggested as an effective way to increase adoption and maintenance of healthy lifestyle behaviours. This paper describes results obtained in the "Walk 2.0" trial to promote physical activity through a self-managed walking programme, using a social networking website that provided an online collaborative environment. Engagement of participants with the website was assessed by monitoring usage of the individual social networking functions (e.g. status post). The results demonstrate that users generally preferred contributing non-interactive public posts of information concerned with their individual physical activity levels, and more occasionally communicating privately to friends. Further analysis of topics within posts was done by classifying word usage frequencies. Results indicated that the dominant topics are well aligned with the social environment within which physical activity takes place. Topics centred around four main areas: description of the activity, timing of the activity, affective response to the activity, and context within which the activity occurs. These findings suggest that strong levels of user awareness and communication occur in the social networking setting, indicative of beneficial self-image and self-actualisation effects.

Physiological vital signs are important factors for clinical processes like tele-assessment, tele-monitoring and tele-treatment of patients. Records of patient vital signs over time are complex to understand without proper visualisation and data analysis aids. We present a model for interactively visualising vital signs in patient data histories, as used for remote chronic disease management. Our model allows simultaneous access to all vital signs records for the patient along a time-based axis. Clinicians and other health carers can then apply generalisation and refinement 'lenses' in a multi-layering visualisation mechanism to examine records further over single or multiple time sessions. The model also includes rule-based decisions for issuing notifications, when expected limits are exceeded.