This paper describes MediNet, a mobile healthcare system that is being developed to personalize the self-care process for patients with both diabetes and cardiovascular disease. These two diseases were chosen based on their interrelationship. Patients with diabetes are at least twice as likely to have heart disease or a stroke as compared to persons without diabetes. Furthermore, persons with diabetes also tend to develop heart disease or have strokes at an earlier age than other people. MediNet uses a reasoning engine to make recommendations to a patient based on current and previous readings from monitoring devices connected to the patient and on information that is known about the patient. It caters for the uniqueness of each patient by personalizing its recommendations based on individual level characteristics of the patient, as well as on characteristics that groups of patients tend to share.

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The availability of mobile healthcare systems is increasing in demand. The world's population today is faced with many health challenges all of which require the patient to be more empowered and monitor his own health. This research focuses on some of the mobile healthcare systems available for the monitoring of two chronic non-communicable diseases: diabetes and hypertension. The study investigates the usability of a new interface that is made available through existing healthcare monitors, one based on Bluetooth transmission. Seven Bluetooth-enabled systems used for measuring and recording blood sugar and blood pressure were selected and evaluated based on a set of user-centered heuristics. This paper focuses on the results of this evaluation. Two systems out of these were then chosen to undergo live user trials with a mobile application called myDR (short for my daily record). The objective of the trials was to confirm that the myDR integrated self-monitoring system was a more efficient and satisfactory method for the measurement and recording of blood sugar and blood pressure; therefore leading to faster adoption and sustainability. The results of the study indicate that the integrated system is more efficient and the preferred interface of the target user group, and that Bluetooth technology is an ideal candidate as the communications protocol for mobile healthcare applications.

Collaborative Disease Management (CDM) refers to interventions that improve outcomes of disease that have been developed on the basis of social learning and self-regulation theories. This research investigates the existing work in peer support, one form of CDM, and proposes an extension to the peer support remote model to incorporate interactive technologies such as mobile phones. We discuss the research problems relating to the design of a mobile health application called Mobile DSMS, a prototype developed based a framework developed as part of the PhD research. We identify existing user-centered approaches in the field of mobile health, describe how these methods were applied to the design and development of a prototype known as Mobile DSMS and we explain how the outcomes of an forthcoming field study are expected to advance the area of CDM and HCI using mobile devices.