Supporting Sustainable Behavior Change and Empowerment in Ubiquitous and Learning Health Systems

Digital health technologies are beginning to be everywhere in our day-to-day lives and are often used continuously. Such ubiquitous and often mobile digital health systems have considerable potential in enabling long-term – or even life-long – accompanying healthcare monitoring and interventions with a focus on prevention and rehabilitation, as to reduce the amount and extent of events that require traditional medical treatment. This can lower individual suffering, as well as the burden on public health systems considerably and has the potential to increase quality-adjusted life years.

The pervasiveness of ubiquitous digital health applications and tools, such as various smartphone applications, patient portals, wearables and other digital health and wellbeing devices also bring novel challenges that require careful consideration in the context of long-term learning health systems, on an individual, group and societal level. These include e.g. data security, privacy, interoperability and ownership issues, equity and justice in access to – and the potential to benefit from – these developments, tendencies towards defunding person-to-person work in health and wellbeing, the question how to design and implement systems that work well for - and actively empower - people, as well as the potential psychological and sociological impacts of continuous monitoring and increased awareness around health and wellbeing.
Special potential arguably lies in longer-term, or even life-long accompanying digital health applications that can build on personalization and customization as enabled by rich individual user models and group models in order to best serve the heterogeneous abilities and needs of their stakeholders. This requires data processing, storage and transfer procedures and regulations, implementation science for bringing digital health applications into real-world practice, together with cautious human-computer interaction work, e.g. to develop fitting interaction schemes that offer user control over data and system behaviors for patient-users, healthcare professionals, and other relevant stakeholder groups.

This Research Topic would therefore invite submissions on topics including but not limited to:
- Personalization and customization in digital health
- Precision medicine in the context of mobile and ubiquitous digital health
- Artificial intelligence and machine learning applications
- Sustainable behavior change in digital health
- Understanding the impact of long-term digital health system use
- Data interoperability and human-data interaction
- Personal health data interaction and integration, personal informatics and health informatics
- Human-AI interaction in healthcare, decision support systems
- Multi-device use, stakeholder integration, customization, personalization
- Democratizing data science and data analytics in health, shared decision-making
- Patient public involvement and open innovation in science
Given the formative nature of the topic, acceptable types of manuscripts include: technical research and development reports, evaluation studies, clinical studies, reviews, opinions / provocations and case studies.