Healthcare Transformation Based on ICT

Abstract: Personalized digital healthcare and wellbeing with the use of wearable devices and accompanying mobile apps is a recently evolved phenomenon. This technology architecture has given birth to a number of actors who make a complex network and work together closely to make things work. At the early stage of this industry, little work has been done focusing on understanding these complex business relationships among the actors in the wearable health ecosystem and also critically analyzing the current nature of the industry’s growth. This thesis contributes in filling this gap. It breaks down the complexity of actors by classifying them into distinguishable components according to their roles in the ecosystem, and identifies their inter-relationships by developing a framework based on the “matters of exchange” among them. The thesis also pinpoints some upcoming challenges in the industry based on the observation made on the current nature of growth among the present actors. Analyzing the cases of the present actors using the tools developed in this thesis, it is concluded that the major challenge lies within the application development frontier of the ecosystems, which is the gateway of innovation in this industry. We have observed that the fragmented growth of ecosystems is individually benefiting the platforms, but not benefiting the innovation in app development as a whole. It is concluded that collaboration among actors in managing and utilizing health data generated from wearable devices, such as a standardization has become essential to control the consequences of this fragmented growth and to enabling a device independent app-innovation environment.