Special Issue: Digital Health in Times of COVID-19

The COVID-19 pandemic by the new coronavirus is evolving and wreaking havoc across the planet at the time of the writing of this editorial for the OMICS special issue on digital health. For the past three months, many institutions and countries have focused their science on COVID-19 to develop new vaccines and drugs. Although emergency and intensive medical care are essential more than ever, digital health has also become a cornerstone of the collective response to the pandemic as people stay at home and practice social distancing.

The OMICS special issue addresses the current rise of digital health. It is a subject that is relevant for 21st century health care as well as for addressing the unprecedented challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. Importantly, digital health is more than electronic health records. It builds on the concept and theory of cyber-physical systems that create a digital replica of all living and inanimate objects on the planet (Özdemir, 2019).

Digital health has diverse definitions as an emergent and rapidly evolving field of scholarship (Özdemir, 2020a, 2020b). However, its three essential ingredients are noteworthy: (1) ubiquitous planetary digital connectivity enabled by new tools and concepts such as the Internet of Things (IoT), (2) sensors embedded in pretty much anything you can imagine, for example, smart watches that monitor heart rate and rhythm and thus, creating and communicating big data (Turakhia et al., 2019), (3) technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) that allow real-time data analysis and sense making from the big data on human biology as well as ecological systems in which humans are situated. Automation in health care and biomedical science is another corollary of digital health when these three digital health drivers come together.

Seen in this light, digital health is a veritable opportunity for integrative biology and systems medicine to broaden its scope from human biology to ecological determinants of health. Pandemics such as COVID-19 are undoubtedly among the ecological determinants of planetary health.

A broad field such as digital health is difficult to capture in its entire range of concepts and applications. Nonetheless, amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important to provide some of the conceivable examples as we move forward to find solutions to the pandemic. Moreover, it is never too soon to think of a “post-corona world” where new technologies and medical fields such as digital health can coexist in greater harmony with, and due attention to social justice and ecological determinants of health than the pre-corona world (Sclove, 2020). Hence, the digital health special issue offers an important and timely insight into this emerging field.

Development of drugs and vaccines against COVID-19 can benefit from real-time data capture on a planetary scale (Browne et al., 2018). The Internet of Pharmaceutical Things (Özdemir, 2020a) is particularly relevant to design clinical trials for drug and vaccine candidates against COVID-19.

The special issue addresses exciting topics such as AI, blockchain, and ways to integrate human intelligence with AI, and experiences from resource-limited countries in implementing the AI suite of technologies. In addition, this volume covers several sophisticated examples of digital health research in public health, new media and science communication, and automation in molecular biology research.

The special issue presents an interview on the concept and emergent practices of responsible innovation in Australia, which is especially timely amidst the pandemic and because emerging technologies can be understood in much greater depth when their societal dimensions are taken into account in a critically informed manner.

I trust that you will enjoy reading the special issue and hope that the new ideas, findings, and practices presented in this volume will conjure up scientists' and public imaginations to identify innovative remedies for the pandemic. We are in this together as planetary society.

I welcome your articles on digital health, the COVID-19 pandemic, and related technologies and tools such as AI, blockchain, and the IoT in the near future.