Abstract
Improving health awareness is essential to health and healthcare sustainability. How to arouse attention to the health of people and encourage them to attend to healthcare progress so that we can reduce the costs of promoting healthcare by achieving more with less effort remains to be explored. In this paper, we provide a simplified health management app, called iTongue, with a basis in traditional Chinese medicine. People use iTongue to take pictures of their tongues to have a general idea of their health. We realize automated tongue image diagnosis using machine learning techniques to establish the relationship between the tongue image features and the cold or hot ZHENG (traditional Chinese medicine syndrome) in traditional Chinese medicine by learning through examples and assisting people to engage in health management. The results show that health management interaction based on traditional Chinese medicine has a positive influence on improving people’s attention to their health, encouraging them to participate in health management activities and develop the habit of caring about their health over the long term. In the future, we could consider using this kind of traditional Chinese medicine idea as a means of publicity to engage people in healthcare and to assist healthcare sustainability development.
Highlights
Health is one of the eternal issues for human beings and the third sustainable development goal of the United Nations—“Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” [1]
How to engage people in healthcare-related work, such as health management, requires motivating them to participate rather than forcing them, and how to increase people’s intrinsic motivation when they are careless about their health or have no awareness of health still remains to be explored
We analyzed the iTongue usage data of the experimental group to check if the tongue diagnosis method in Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) had a positive influence on their daily activities
Summary
Health is one of the eternal issues for human beings and the third sustainable development goal of the United Nations—“Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages” [1]. Taking China as an example, the rise of the country is closely linked to the improvement in national health. The average life expectancy of the Chinese has rapidly increased, ranking among the highest in the same category of countries and regions and close to the level of developed countries [2]. If countries want to continue their methods of sustainable development, whether they can solve the problem of national health will become a very important issue. Almost every country has invested a great deal of human and financial resources in healthcare to ensure a healthy cycle of national health; in addition, countries have introduced a series of methods to help healthcare to be sustainable [4,5,6,7]
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