JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Smart cities and digital public health are closely connected. Managing the digital transformation in urbanization and living spaces is challenging. It is critical to prioritize the emotional and physical health and well-being of humans and their animals in the dynamic and ever-changing environment they share. Human-animal bonds are continuous, as they live together or share urban spaces, and have a mutual impact on each other's health as well as the surrounding environment. Additionally, sensors embedded in the Internet of Things (IoT) are everywhere in smart cities. They monitor events and provide appropriate responses. In this regard, Accident & Emergency Informatics (A&EI) offers tools to identify and manage overtime hazards and disruptive events. Such manifold focuses fit with One Digital Health (ODH), which aims to transform health ecosystems with digital technology proposing a comprehensive framework to manage data and support health-oriented policies.

Objective:

We show and discuss how, developing the concept of ODH Intervention, the ODH framework can support the comprehensive monitoring and analyzing of daily life events of humans and animals in technologically integrated environments, such as smart homes and smart cities.

Methods:

We developed an ODH Intervention use case wherein A&EI mechanisms run in the background. The ODH framework structures the related data collection and analysis to enhance the understanding of humans, animals, and environment interactions and associated outcomes. The use case looks at the daily journey of Tracy, a healthy 27-year-old woman, and her dog, Mego. Using medical IoT, their activities are continuously monitored and analyzed to prevent or manage any kind of health-related abnormality.

Results:

We report and comment on an ODH intervention as an example of an ODH real-life implementation. We give the reader examples of a “how-to” analysis of Tracy’s and Mego’s daily life activities, as part of a timely implementation of the ODH framework. For each activity, relations to the ODH dimensions are scored, and relevant technical fields are evaluated in the light of the findable-accessible-interoperable-reusable (FAIR) principles. This "how-to" can be used as a template for further analyses.

Conclusions:

An ODH intervention is based on FAIR data and real-time processing for global health monitoring, emergency management, and research. The data should be collected and analyzed continuously in a spatial-temporal domain to detect changes in behavior, trends, and emergencies. The information periodically gathered should serve human, animal, and environmental health interventions by providing professionals and caregivers with inputs and “how-to” to improve health and welfare and risk prevention at the individual and population levels. Thus, ODH complementarily combined with A&EI, is meant to enhance policies and systems and modernize emergency management.