Health Web Science (HWS) is a sub-discipline of

Web Science Web science is an emerging interdisciplinary field concerned with the study of large-scale socio-technical systems, particularly the World Wide Web. It considers the relationship between people and technology, the ways that society and technolo ...

that examines the interplay between

health sciences The following outline is provided as an overview of and topical guide to health sciences: Health sciences – those sciences that focus on health, or health care, as core parts of their subject matter. Health sciences relate to multiple a ...

, health and well-being, and the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW or simply the Web) is an information system that enables Content (media), content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond Information technology, IT specialists and hobbyis ...

. It assumes that each domain influences the others. HWS thus complements and overlaps with Medicine 2.0 (medicine enabled by emerging technologies). Research has uncovered

emergent properties In philosophy, systems theory, science, and art, emergence occurs when a complex entity has properties or behaviors that its parts do not have on their own, and emerge only when they interact in a wider whole. Emergence plays a central role ...

that arise as individuals interact with each other, with healthcare providers and with the Web itself.

History

HWS began at the Web Science Curriculum meeting in the summer of 2010 at the University of Southampton where approximately forty scholars came together to discuss the subject. That was followed by a foundational Workshop in Koblenz 2011 under the aegis of ACM. The dialogue to more precisely define HWS as a sub-discipline of Web Science began among Web-oriented investigators at the 2012 Medicine 2.0 Conference and was formalized in 2013. This nascent discipline of Health Web Science is further described and developed in the monograph "Health Web Science". A call to action at the ACM Web Science workshop asked the community to consider how to accelerate the discipline. In particular, beyond the available knowledge-gathering technologies (e.g.

blogs A blog (a Clipping (morphology), truncation of "weblog") is an informational website consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries also known as posts. Posts are typically displayed in Reverse chronology, reverse chronologic ...

, social-medicine portals, experience mining,

graph theory In mathematics and computer science, graph theory is the study of ''graph (discrete mathematics), graphs'', which are mathematical structures used to model pairwise relations between objects. A graph in this context is made up of ''Vertex (graph ...

network analysis Network analysis can refer to: * Network theory, the analysis of relations through mathematical graphs ** Social network analysis, network theory applied to social relations * Network analysis (electrical circuits) See also *Network planning and d ...

, and

game theory Game theory is the study of mathematical models of strategic interactions. It has applications in many fields of social science, and is used extensively in economics, logic, systems science and computer science. Initially, game theory addressed ...

), what additional is required to deal with the Health Web's emergent properties? For example, what is needed to curate, interrogate, and visualize the combination of both '

Big Data Big data primarily refers to data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data processing, data-processing application software, software. Data with many entries (rows) offer greater statistical power, while data with ...

' – arising from the increasingly pervasive sources and sensors including "the

Internet of things Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communication networks. The IoT encompasse ...

, the

quantified self Quantified self is both the cultural phenomenon of self-tracking with technology and a community of users and makers of self-tracking tools who share an interest in "self-knowledge through numbers". Quantified self practices overlap with the pract ...

smart cities A smart city is an urban area that uses digital technology to collect data and operate services. Data is collected from citizens, devices, buildings, or cameras. Applications include traffic and transportation systems, power plants, utilities ...

, and smart homes – and smaller-scale data arising from individual patient conversations, self-reporting, and self-exploration? How are small-scale innovations safely and efficiently scaled up to the size of the Web and scaled out to millions of patients? One research group argued for technologies that enable predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory (P4) medicine. Other stated needs include an "Expert Patient" capable of making sense of online medical information in a personal context, tools to cope with

information overload Information overload (also known as infobesity, infoxication, or information anxiety) is the difficulty in understanding an issue and Decision making, effectively making decisions when one has too much information (TMI) about that issue, and is ...

through e.g.,

text mining Text mining, text data mining (TDM) or text analytics is the process of deriving high-quality information from text. It involves "the discovery by computer of new, previously unknown information, by automatically extracting information from differe ...

and semantic technologies, in particular through algorithm-aided decision making.

Health web observatory

At the Medicine 2.0 European meeting in 2014, the case was made for the need to design bespoke health web observatories. The Web Science Trust introduced the concept of a Web observatory as an integrated collection of data sources and analysis tools that enables observation and experimentation for Web study, and positioned it to bridge the gap between big data analytics and the data. A Health Web observatory, therefore, gathers and links health data on the Web (big data and broad data) in order to answer questions. This facilitates the 'Healthcare Singularity'Gillam et al.(2009
The healthcare singularity and the age of semantic medicine
In The Fourth Paradigm Data-Intensive Scientific Discovery. Microsoft Research Washington. where bench-to-bedside and experiment-to-practice becomes instantaneous. HWS combines the axiom of 'first do no harm' (

Hippocrates Hippocrates of Kos (; ; ), also known as Hippocrates II, was a Greek physician and philosopher of the Classical Greece, classical period who is considered one of the most outstanding figures in the history of medicine. He is traditionally referr ...

) with 'do no evil' (

Google Google LLC (, ) is an American multinational corporation and technology company focusing on online advertising, search engine technology, cloud computing, computer software, quantum computing, e-commerce, consumer electronics, and artificial ...

), paying specific attention to technology and safeguards.

References

{{Reflist, 30em Health websites Internet culture Emergence