Hightlights from Digital Health 2017

Digital Health 2017: Global Public Health, Personalised Medicine, and Emergency Medicine in the Age of Big Data

Everything is affected by the digital revolution. The opportunities for interdisciplinary digital health research bringing together computer science to dramatically improve public health, global health and wellbeing of individuals and populations globally are extraordinary.

Recent technological advances enabled by creation of real-time big data streams, social media, participatory and context-aware systems and infectious disease modelling are the focus of public health informatics.

At Digital Health 2017, held for the first time as an independent event, a new strategic theme will be introduced: emergency and humanitarian medicine addressing acute needs of natural and manmade disasters will leverage opportunities created by geo-located big data, mobile technology and crowdsourcing for improving resilience, early warning and response to disasters and emergencies. DH 2017 will cover a wide spectrum of subjects including communities of practice and social networks, analytics and engagement with tracking and monitoring wearable devices, big data, public health surveillance, persuasive technologies, epidemic intelligence, participatory surveillance, disaster and emergency medicine, serious games for public health interventions and automated early identification of health threats and response.

“I learnt a lot about digital data analysis going on, and serious gaming. We are now exploring a potential new project as a direct result of this conference.” DH 2016

Building on successful conference series Electronic healthcare (ehealth) held in London (2008), Istanbul (2009), Casablanca (2010) and Malaga (2011) and Public Health in Digital Age Workshop held with WWW conference in Rio de Janeiro (2013) and Seoul (2014), and then Digital Health 2015 held in Florence, and Digital Health 2016 in Montreal, the aim of this interdisciplinary conference is to bring together public health agencies (WHO, ECDC, CDC, PHE) and computer science and IT and MedTech industry to cross-fertilize ideas and drive this growing interdisciplinary discipline.