In his seminal work, Truth and Method, the German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer distinguishes between three types of what he calls the experience of the 'Thou'. In this paper, Gadamer's analysis of this experience is explained in terms of his philosophical hermeneutics and brought to bear upon the patient-professional relationship. It is argued that while Gadamer's analysis implies fruitful in...

An increasing number of people visit online health communities to share experiences and seek health information. Although studies have enumerated reasons for patients' visits to online communities for health information from peers, we know little about how patients gain health information from the moderators in these communities. We qualitatively analyze 480 patient and moderator posts from six...

With the pervasiveness of smart phones and the advance of wireless body sensor networks (BSNs), mobile Healthcare (m-Healthcare), which extends the operation of Healthcare provider into a pervasive environment for better health monitoring, has attracted considerable interest recently. However, the flourish of m-Healthcare still faces many challenges including information security and privacy pr...

Patient-ventilator synchrony is a complex issue affected by ventilator performance, patient characteristics, and the patient-ventilator interface. The history of patient-ventilator interaction includes avoidance of pharmacalogic paralysis, the development of spontaneous breathing systems, microprocessor technology to maximize interaction, and closed-loop control. While most clinicians agree tha...