E-Health Communities for Learning Healthy Habits

2012 ◽  
pp. 310-325
Author(s):  
Åsa Smedberg

There are e-health communities of many different kinds available on the Internet today. Some e-health communities are for people who need to change their established bad, or unhealthy, habits such as the ones for people suffering from overweight or smoking. To develop and maintain a healthier life-style is not an easy task to succeed with, it involves being able to change everyday situations. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, whether these e-health communities actively support learning depends on the ways they help community members reflect upon their habits, underlying reasons and motivational factors. In this chapter, the author presents a framework for how to evaluate these e-health communities from a learning perspective. The framework covers different types of conversation topics, ways to respond and community knowledge.

Author(s):  
Åsa Smedberg

There are e-health communities of many different kinds available on the Internet today. Some e-health communities are for people who need to change their established bad, or unhealthy, habits such as the ones for people suffering from overweight or smoking. To develop and maintain a healthier life-style is not an easy task to succeed with, it involves being able to change everyday situations. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, whether these e-health communities actively support learning depends on the ways they help community members reflect upon their habits, underlying reasons and motivational factors. In this chapter, the author presents a framework for how to evaluate these e-health communities from a learning perspective. The framework covers different types of conversation topics, ways to respond and community knowledge.


Author(s):  
Åsa Smedberg ◽  
Hélène Sandmark

Different kinds of applications for self-help are available on the Internet today. Some aim to intervene with users’ life patterns such as negative stress exposure. It is not always an easy task to manage stressful life situations and to develop and maintain healthy living. It involves learning how to balance perceived demands from working and personal life, and to question underlying thoughts and beliefs. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, previous studies have shown that combining knowledge of health experts and the experiences of peers can create a good synergy. The question is how these findings can be applied to the area of stress management. In this chapter, the authors present a web-based self-help system for stress management based on a holistic view of actors and their different types of support. The system offers the user information in the form of research and real life stories, practical exercises (both text- and video-based), and the opportunity to interact with health experts and peers, all in an integrated way.


2012 ◽  
pp. 1469-1486
Author(s):  
Åsa Smedberg ◽  
Hélène Sandmark

Different kinds of applications for self-help are available on the Internet today. Some aim to intervene with users’ life patterns such as negative stress exposure. It is not always an easy task to manage stressful life situations and to develop and maintain healthy living. It involves learning how to balance perceived demands from working and personal life, and to question underlying thoughts and beliefs. E-health communities can assist in this process through continuous interactions between community members. However, previous studies have shown that combining knowledge of health experts and the experiences of peers can create a good synergy. The question is how these findings can be applied to the area of stress management. In this chapter, the authors present a web-based self-help system for stress management based on a holistic view of actors and their different types of support. The system offers the user information in the form of research and real life stories, practical exercises (both text- and video-based), and the opportunity to interact with health experts and peers, all in an integrated way.


SPIEL ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-119
Author(s):  
Kathrin Fahlenbrach

The Internet has become a central place for protest communication: the organization of protest actions, the networking of potential activists, the dissemination of information, the calling for participation in protest actions, and the mobilization of support for protest concerns. All these and other practices have migrated from the analog to the digital sphere of publicity on the Internet. Thus the forms and strategies of public protest and activism have also changed and expanded. The article traces the special conditions of protest mobilization on the Internet. Against this background it examines different types of activist online videos with their specific audiovisual rhetorical strategies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 174804852199056
Author(s):  
Baruch Shomron ◽  
Amit Schejter

This study examines how media representations of Palestinian-Israeli politicians, can help community members realize their capabilities. The study’s database is comprised of 1,207 interviews conducted with Palestinian-Israeli politicians on news and current affairs programs on the three national television channels and the two national radio stations in Israel, for 24 months (2016-2017). We identified and analyzed the differences in the modes of representation between national and local Palestinian-Israeli politicians and between Palestinian-Israeli parliament members in the Joint List and Palestinian-Israeli parliament members in Zionist parties, all through the capabilities prism. In this study, we demonstrated how different types of Palestinian-Israeli politicians may potentially affect the realization of different political functions and capabilities. Analyzing political representations in the media through the theoretical framework of the ‘capabilities approach’ contributes to a more comprehensive insight into the roles the media can play promoting people’s wellbeing and human rights, relative to traditional media theories.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (15) ◽  
pp. 7063
Author(s):  
Esmaeel Rezaee ◽  
Ali Mohammad Saghiri ◽  
Agostino Forestiero

With the increasing growth of different types of data, search engines have become an essential tool on the Internet. Every day, billions of queries are run through few search engines with several privacy violations and monopoly problems. The blockchain, as a trending technology applied in various fields, including banking, IoT, education, etc., can be a beneficial alternative. Blockchain-based search engines, unlike monopolistic ones, do not have centralized controls. With a blockchain-based search system, no company can lay claims to user’s data or access search history and other related information. All these data will be encrypted and stored on a blockchain. Valuing users’ searches and paying them in return is another advantage of a blockchain-based search engine. Additionally, in smart environments, as a trending research field, blockchain-based search engines can provide context-aware and privacy-preserved search results. According to our research, few efforts have been made to develop blockchain use, which include studies generally in the early stages and few white papers. To the best of our knowledge, no research article has been published in this regard thus far. In this paper, a survey on blockchain-based search engines is provided. Additionally, we state that the blockchain is an essential paradigm for the search ecosystem by describing the advantages.


2001 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gerard Goggin ◽  
Catherine Griff

Much of the present debate about content on the internet revolves around how to control the distribution of different sorts of harmful or undesirable material. Yet there are considerable issues about whether sufficient sorts of desired cultural content will be available, such as ‘national’, ‘Australian’ content. In traditional broadcasting, regulation has been devised to encourage or mandate different types of content, where it is believed that the market will not do so by itself. At present, such regulatory arrangements are under threat in television, as the Productivity Commission Broadcasting Inquiry final report has noted. But what of the future for certain types of content on the internet? Do we need specific regulation and policy to promote the availability of content on the internet? Or is such a project simply irrelevant in the context of gradual but inexorable media convergence? Is regulating for content just as quixotic and fraught with peril as regulating of content from a censorship perspective often appears to be? In this article, we consider the case of Australian content for broadband technologies, especially in relation to film and video, and make some preliminary observations on the promotion and regulation of internet content.


2017 ◽  
Vol 26 (4) ◽  
pp. 375-385 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tuğba Özbölük ◽  
Yunus Dursun

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the different types of members based on their roles within an online brand community dedicated to Apple. Design/methodology/approach Design/methodology/approach Data are drawn from an 18-month netnographic study, including participant and non-participant observation. Findings Findings reveal that members of the online brand community share a common goal but they are heterogeneous in many respects. In this research, five different types of brand community members are identified: learner, pragmatist, activist, opinion leader and evangelist. These findings emphasize the heterogeneity of the brand community or the differences of members and subgroups they form in the community. Practical implications This paper offers some insights for brand managers. There are different sub-tribes in online brand communities and these sub-tribes develop their own meanings of the brand. This means that online brand communities do not form one single homogenous target group and can be segmented into subgroups. Findings also offer a deeper understanding of negative characteristics of online brand community members. The role “activist” found in this study may be crucial for marketers, as activists can represent the negative side of online brand communities. Originality/value The literature on brand communities has focused predominantly on the homogeneity of these communities. This paper extends the literature by demonstrating the heterogeneity in an online brand community. The paper contributes to the brand community literature by substantiating that online brand community members can be segmented into subgroups based on their roles within the community. In addition, the paper extends the existing literature on brand communities that has overlooked the destructive consumer roles.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-13
Author(s):  
Fernando Rebollar ◽  
Rocío Aldeco-Perez ◽  
Marco A. Ramos

The general population increasingly uses digital services, meaning services which are delivered over the internet or an electronic network, and events such as pandemics have accelerated the need of using new digital services. Governments have also increased their number of digital services, however, these digital services still lack of sufficient information security, particularly integrity. Blockchain uses cryptographic techniques that allow decentralization and increase the integrity of the information it handles, but it still has disadvantages in terms of efficiency, making it incapable of implementing some digital services where a high rate of transactions are required. In order to increase its efficient, a multi-layer proposal based on blockchain is presented. It has four layers, where each layer specializes in a different type of information and uses properties of public blockchain and private blockchain. An statistical analysis is performed and the proposal is modeled showing that it maintains and even increases the integrity of the information while preserving the efficiency of transactions. Besides, the proposal can be flexible and adapt to different types of digital services. It also considers that voluntary nodes participate in the decentralization of information making it more secure, verifiable, transparent and reliable.


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