Abstract
Smart Communities understand the potential of Internet technology, and make a conscious decision to adopt this technology to transform life and work in significant and positive ways. Smart communities could be effectively supported by social network solutions, though specific issues should be explored to efficiently model the behaviour of community member, in a way similar to the way they interact in the real world. In this chapter, we focus on MedWeight Smart Community, built to support volunteers trying to maintain weight loss. It enables them to be members of a community composed by both other volunteers and nutrition experts, taking into consideration the way support groups are formed in the real world. To support MedWeight smart community, a corresponding social network platform was built, extending the typical social network model to support roles, relations and complex content dissemination and interaction policies.
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Acknowledgements
The research presented in the paper is part of the work conducted in the project Med-Weight Study: Lifestyles for Weight Loss Maintenance funded by Coca-Cola Foundation. We would like to give special thanks to all the volunteers and dietitians participating in MedWeight Smart Community.
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Meletakis, G. et al. (2018). MedWeight Smart Community: A Social Approach. In: Ismail, L., Zhang, L. (eds) Information Innovation Technology in Smart Cities. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-10-1741-4_11
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