Social support is critical for improving patients’ health outcomes. People living with chronic diseases are often socially excluded and thus face many challenges in their lives. The type and amount of social support they receive from online health care communities can potentially enhance their quality of life. This research verifies emotional support, informational support, companionship, and relatedness as four categories of online social support pertinent in health care communities. In examining the detailed effects of multidimensional online social support on physical, psychological, and existential quality of life, this research finds that the impact of emotional support on psychological quality of life is most effective. An empirical survey of 349 participants finds that the influential outcomes of online social support on quality of life depend on stigmatized patients’ perceptions of their level of social exclusion. In general, stigmatized patients with high levels of social exclusion seek a variety of online social support and attain a more improved quality of life than those patients with lower levels of social exclusion. This research recommends that the health care sector emphasize patients’ synergies and develop online customer resources to extend the limited medical support available.

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to explore the dynamics of online health care communities and the impact of two-way online social support on customers’ well-being and patients’ quality of life, at different social exclusion levels. Design/methodology/approach: – An online survey in China’s Anti-Hepatitis B Online Community includes 326 respondents. A combined hierarchical regression analysis and structural equation model test the hypotheses. Findings: – Both receiving and giving online social support, as reciprocal altruism behaviors, enhance patients’ well-being. Receiving online social support influences psychological well-being most; giving has the largest impact on existential domains. Social exclusion boosts the benefits of giving online social support but attenuates the benefits of receiving it. Research limitations/implications: – This research focusses on the effects of online social support among socially excluded patients. Extensions could rely on objective instead of subjective measures and alternative methodologies to test the underlying processes. Additional insights could derive from a bidirectional perspective. Practical implications: – Medical treatment institutions should leverage customer resources; health care providers should prioritize patients who feel socially excluded as effective online support providers. Health care community administrators can use several means to convince patients to contribute to communities. Originality/value: – Social support in online health care communities is a collaborative service that uses customers as service resources. This study explains the collaborative service and how customers feel about their bidirectional roles. It also extends reciprocal altruism research to a health information technology realm by systematically exploring how giving, vs receiving, online social support affects customers’ well-being.

This study focuses on patient engagement in online health communities (OHCs) and investigates the mechanism related to the impact of social support provided by patients on their personal engagement. Based on social support theory, we put forward a research model and conduct empirical analysis using datasets of 4797 patients with 160,484 posts and 1,647,569 replies from an online health community in China. The mediation of peer involvement and moderation of community status are also examined. The results indicate that the subdimensions of social support positively influence patient engagement with informational support exerting the greatest impact. Peer patient involvement imposes significant partial and positive mediating effects on the relationships, especially on informational support. Community status negatively moderates the impacts of social interactions and informational support on patient engagement in that the influence of social interactions and informational support are more profound for patients with low community status. The findings can bring an understanding of patient engagement in OCHs, and provide theoretical and practical implications to facilitate the development of an online healthcare service.

Object tracking is one of the most important fields in computer vision and image processing community. In this paper, a novel method for tracking of moving object is proposed. We analyze many methods which are used to segment the Video Object (VO). Then we propose a way, which is based on optical flow, to track object by using the object contour. This algorithm achieves the effective object tracking in spatial position. The experiment result shows that moving object tracking is accurate, rapid and stable by using this algorithm.