Community-Based Social Media for Low-Income Pediatric Asthma Patients

The social support has shown positive influence on self-management of chronic illness. With the advance of technology, there have been researches on the role of Social Media in healthcare. In this paper, we propose a community-based Social Media system, called Asthma411 for low-income children with asthma. Asthma411 is based on Short Message System (SMS) of cell phone because it is relatively inexpensive and it is ubiquitous. Because it is a community-based social media, it is tightly coupled with the real world. Though the traditional social media can share only general information for healthcare, Asthma411 allows people to watch the children with asthma and report their symptoms in real time, and makes it possible for people around the children to manage or help the children in asthma exacerbation. Due to the features of being ubiquitous, real time monitoring and caring of the children with asthma, Asthma411 is an advanced and proactive social media for chronic healthcare.