JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Climate change, local epidemics, future pandemics, and forced migrations pose significant public health threats worldwide. To cope successfully, people and communities are faced with the challenging task of developing Resilience to these stressors. Our viewpoint is that the powerful capabilities of modern informatics technologies including Artificial Intelligence, biomedical and environmental sensors, Augmented/Virtual Reality, Data Science, and other digital hardware/software, have great potential to promote, sustain, and support Resilience in people and communities. However, there is no “one size fits all” solution for Resilience. Solutions must match the specific effects of the stressor, cultural dimensions, social determinants of health, technology infrastructure and many other factors. Accordingly, we propose Resilience Informatics (RI) as a people-centric research discipline concerned with the design, development, and evaluation of informatics systems to promote, sustain, and support Resilience. We identify significant factors underlying design and development of RI tools/systems and a 6-component framework to guide development of such systems. We present a case study of an application of this framework to an mHealth system designed to support resilience during the COVD-19 pandemic. We suggest that Resilience Informatics has great potential to enhance the ability of populations, organizations, and the environment to respond successfully to natural and man-made stressors. There is a critical need for further research to reify principles and practices of RI to support resilience efforts worldwide.