Frontiers in Digital Health

We have come a long way from modern medicine in the 19th century via mechanisation in the 20th century, subsequent increasing automation and the rise of information technology in medicine, finally arriving at “Medicine 4.0” in the age of Digital Health. Today, after this wild ride from the arrival of modern anaesthesia via x-ray to the first robotics in medicine, we witness increasing “digitisation” and connection of medical data collected in rapidly growing size. The great improvements seen in Artificial Intelligence in the last decade such as by the advent of Deep Learning and the great achievements recently made in Big Data analysis help these days to gain deeper insight into diseases and health care challenges often from a bigger population than ever before. At the same time, medicine and health care is increasingly becoming personalised to our individual needs likewise increasing effectiveness, usability, and thereby hopefully the adherence of patients. Related to these advancements, health technology continues to re-innovate itself benefitting from the field’s fast-paced changes driven by the rise of Digital Health. All these highly promising changes and innovations, however, lead to urgent ethical questions that require rapid and rigorous responses. Putting all of the pieces together, there is great promise to lead into an era of health service hopefully marked by increasing prediction and prevention rather than diagnosis and treatment available to all, anywhere, anytime, efficient, explainable, ethical, reliable, robust, and in real-time. In this light, Frontiers in Digital Health is a multidisciplinary open-access journal publishing rigorously peer-reviewed research in its field. It positions itself at the forefront of disseminating and communicating latest and excellent scientific knowledge and highly impactful and crucial discoveries and findings in its field.