Understanding the Advantages of Mobile Solutions for Chronic Disease Management

Abstract

In an environment of escalating healthcare costs, chronic disease management is particularly challenging, since, by definition such diseases have no foreseeable cure and if poorly managed typically lead to further, complicated secondary health issues, which ultimately only serve to exacerbate cost. Diabetes is one of the leading chronic diseases and its prevalence continues to rise exponentially. Thus it behooves all to focus on solutions that can result in superior management of this disease. Hence, this article presents findings from a longitudinal exploratory case study that examined the application of a pervasive technology solution; a mobile phone, to provide superior diabetes self-care. Notably, the benefits of a pervasive technology solution for supporting superior self-care in the context of chronic disease are made especially apparent when viewed through the rich lens of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and thus the paper underscores the importance of using ANT in such contexts to facilitate a deeper understanding of all potential advantages.

Using ANT to Understand Key Issues for Successful E-Health Solutions

“…Therefore, Actor Networks are highly dynamic and inherently unstable in their nature; and a better understanding of how alignment between people, technology, their roles, routines, values, training and incentives as well as understanding of the role of technology and how it can facilitate or negatively impact the work process and tasks in an organization, and/or can stabilize the network to some extent can be better understood [44][45]. Thus, ANT can provide a material-semiotic approach and hence be an appropriately rich lens to study the ordering of scientific, technological, social, and organizational processes and events [45]. And it is for precisely these reasons ANT is proffered in this paper to facilitate a better understanding of e-health solution success.…”

“…Actor/Actant: Actors are the web of participants in the network including all human and non-human entities. Because of the strong biased interpretation of the word actor towards human; a word actant is commonly used to refer both human and non-human actors [45]. Examples include humans, organizations, technology, technical artifacts and graphical representations.…”

“…Heterogeneous Network: is a network of aligned interests formed by the actors. This is a network of materially different actors that is achieved by a great deal of work that both shapes those various social and non-social elements, and "disciplines" them so that they work together, instead of "making off on their own" [45].…”

“…As the token is increasingly transmitted or passed through the network, it becomes increasingly punctualised and also increasingly reified especially when the token is decreasingly transmitted, or when an actor fails to transmit the token [45]. 4.…”

Analyzing the Vehicle Insurance Ecosystem in Estonia using Actor-Network Theory

“…Theory: Tokens are created through the successful interaction of actors/actants in a network and are passed between Actors within the network. These token, as they are increasingly transmitted or passed through the network, become punctualized and materialized (Wickramasinghe, et al, 2012). Result: During the trials, no such tokens were identified.…”