Abstract

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Digital Health is becoming central in everyday life. Basically we can mention three expectations about health and the internet: healthcare cost savings, personalization of medicine and increase of people participation. The use of technologies such as mobile devices and social media is not only changing the way we communicate, but is also providing innovative ways for citizens to search for medical information and improve their health and well-being. Indeed, people can use digital health to monitor, manage and track their health and wellness related activities. Moreover, these technologies open new opportunities related to data sharing both for patients and for medical communities.  Therefore, social media in healthcare change the traditional one-to-one patient-doctor relationship into several ones: doctors-patients, patients-patients and doctors-doctors. Thanks’ to data collected and shared by people, medicine becomes increasingly participative and personalized opening new opportunities to improve the quality of healthcare. Nonetheless, digital health can also determine some risks for what concerns data surveillance, privacy threat, medicalization, new forms of stigmatization and social inequities, self-medication and self-treatment.

Proposals should deal with one of the following suggested topics:

• Quantified Self and real time data analytics

• M-health for global health

• Mobile technologies for chronic illness

• Public health surveillance through Big data analytics

• Crowdsourcing and participatory medicine

• Citizens Science for health and well-being

• Digital well-being promotion and health gamification

• Digital health literacy

• Social inequalities and digital health 

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Session organizer(s)

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Linda Lombi (IT) – Ph.D in Sociology, is Lecturer at the Università Cattolica in Milan where she teaches Sociology and Methods (Faculty of Education Science). Her research interests focus on health sociology, citizen science, participatory medicine, digital narratives, digital research, and Big Data.

 

Antonio Maturo (IT) – is Associate Professor at Bologna University and Regular Visiting Professor at Brown University. His research focuses on digital health, cancer experience, medicalization. He recently published Good Pharma, Palgrave (with Donald Light).

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