E-Health, The Way Of The Future Is Now

From managing diabetes to quitting smoking to potty training to mental health, resources on the web can be utilized to monitor and ultimately improve your health.

The computerised nature of e-health lends itself well to research, which developers are using to refine their treatments. One discovery is that users don’t like overly complicated programs that bombard them with options. “There’s been a tendency to do things just because we can. The feedback we get is ‘Stop making me choose things. I want help, not choices’,” says David Austin, co-director of the eTherapy unit at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia. Tailoring the response of programs to individuals is also crucial. “When we extracted the most information from the assessment, and used it to create the most highly tailored program, we got quit rates of 38 per cent in patients who used nicotine patches,” says Strecher. “Not even group therapy can achieve that.”