Research Challenges of Emerging Technologies Supporting Life-Long Health and Wellbeing

Abstract

In this article, we identify and discuss challenges imposed on technological research by emerging developments in health and wellbeing. We see an increasing importance of digital health literacy, the convergence of medicine and daily life, a shift from individual health to community care, a growth of personalized medicine, and the impact of internet of things on health. These developments mean challenges for technical research, such as the need, but also difficulties of interdisciplinarity, or the need to translate personal health data into medical information. Today's research approaches are not always best suited to deal with the challenges, e.g. of conducting real long term intervention studies, or taking into account regulatory issues. We propose a joint campaign by HCI, AI, UX and machine learning researchers, engineers, clinicians, regulatory bodies and all other interested parties in these subjects.