In this paper we describe mobile virtual healthcare communities as a solution for meeting cancer patients information and interaction needs. After an introduction into the healthcare system and its potential starting points for virtual communities, we focus on cancer patients. We analyse their situation through field studies and identify information and interaction needs. On this basis we derive requirements for user centric socio technical system design for cancer patients. As at present no existing offers meet these prerequisite, we intend to develop and implement a mobile healthcare community for cancer patients. The objective is to introduce a socially accepted, technically stable and economically reasonable system. By the time of the conference we assume to have implemented this community platform.
['Jan Marco Leimeister', 'Miriam Daum', 'Helmut Krcmar']
MOBILE VIRTUAL HEALTHCARE COMMUNITIES: AN APPROACH TO COMMUNITY ENGINEERING FOR CANCER PATIENTS