A sustainable platform for e-service system design

Abstract

By integrating system thinking and social psychology, this paper presents an Activity System Theory (AST) approach to the platform design of e-service systems in general, and e-healthcare systems in specific. In the first part, some important principles of AST and a sustainable model of human activity system are introduced. Then a project ‘Integrated Mobile Information System for Healthcare (IMIS)’ is presented to demonstrate how to construct a comprehensive platform for various complex e-service systems based on the sustainable model of AST. Our research focused on the complex e-healthcare system in Sweden, and the results showed that the model of AST can provide the designers of e-service system with a comprehensive and sustainable platform for designing various kinds of e-service systems.

Keywords

E-services / E-healthcare / sustainable platform design / activity system theory (AST)

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