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Digital health: scaling healthcare to the world
Rivas H., Wac K., Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland, 2018. 370 pp. Type: Book (978-3-319614-45-8)
Date Reviewed: Mar 9 2021

Digital health generally refers to the application of computer technology to healthcare. This takes several forms, for example, storing electronic health records (EHRs), mobile device applications that provide guidance or reminders, and specialized hardware such as wearable sensors for pulse monitoring or other bodily functions. And it goes much farther: virtually all aspects of digital technology will interact with healthcare provision. Artificial intelligence (AI) is already being used in disease diagnosis and drug discovery. Digital telecommunications are employed for remote doctor visits and to permit robot-assisted surgery from a distance. Virtual reality (VR) is used to educate surgeons and combat post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and for pain management. Smartphones provide a variety of apps that perform various health-related functions, and 3D printing enables the production of custom prosthetics such as joint replacements.

The merging of digital technology with healthcare also has moral, ethical, and legal considerations. As the saying goes, “he who treats himself has a fool for a doctor.” However, the Internet gives anyone with access the ability to find all sorts of data that may or may not be properly vetted for accuracy. Smartphones are powerful multi-function computers. Their components can be used in novel ways to monitor health, from providing reminders to take medications to using the device’s camera and flash to measure one’s pulse. Connecting wearable devices such as smartwatches can offer other measurements of bodily functions. When such an application or hardware device is released, who determines efficacy and insures that a bug does no harm? In the recent past, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a cellphone-connected portable electrocardiogram (EKG) device, but the FDA’s involvement in digital devices and software is relatively rare.

The book covers a wide range of topics. It provides quite a lot of interesting health statistics and other information on tools and technologies. The main downside to this work is its age. Published in 2018, the information is at least three years old. Digital technology has advanced rapidly, as it always has. Discussions of legality, ethics, and directions are less sensitive to the passage of time, but there is no mention of 5G and the implications of its high-speed wireless communications, for example. For another, it lists Theranos as a viable concern for improved technology for blood testing, when the company’s product was shown to be fraudulent in the same year this book was published. That said, much of the material remains relevant and should be of interest to researchers in the field. Each chapter typically lists two or more pages of references, including relevant uniform resource locators (URLs).

Reviewer:  G. R. Mayforth Review #: CR147208 (2107-0176)
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