Digital health, which includes digital care programs, is the convergence of digital technologies with health, healthcare, living, and society to enhance the efficiency of healthcare delivery and make medicine more personalized and precise. The discipline involves the use of information and communication technologies to help address the health problems and challenges faced by people under treatment. These technologies include both hardware and software solutions and services, including telemedicine, wearable devices, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Generally, digital health is concerned about the development of interconnected health systems to improve the use of computational technologies, smart devices, computational analysis techniques, and communication media to aid healthcare professionals and their patients manage illnesses and health risks, as well as promote health and wellbeing.
Although digital health platforms hold a number of possible benefits, critics warn against potential privacy violations of personal health data and the role digital health could play in increasing the health and digital divide between social majority and minority groups. Worldwide adoption of electronic medical records has been on the rise since 1990 and is closely correlated with the existence of universal health care. Digital health is a multi-disciplinary domain involving many stakeholders, including clinicians, researchers and scientists with a wide range of expertise in healthcare, engineering, social sciences, public health, health economics and data management.