Trends in Microbiome and Digital One Health

This talk will try to clarify some misconceptions about what digital health (DH) is, and what it should not be. Advances in ICT have created the opportunity, but also the increasing need, to digitize, communicate and store large quantities of health-related data, and make that data available to researchers and practitioners. The intention is obviously a good one. However, there is a widespread belief that DH is just Health powered by ICT: use, by the biomedical sector, of more powerful or sophisticated computers, files, programs, devices, AI/ML...

This simplistic vision is bringing in a threat surface that we are not ready to encompass with the current ICT industry state of the art. Serious failures have been accompanying the recent expansion of digital means in biomedical research and practice--- privacy violations, exclusion, unavailability, treatment mistakes, etc.

There is still a long way to track, including some redefinition of the DH towards a more inclusive and holistic perspective (of which One Health is an interesting example), and research, development and innovation in key ICT aspects promoting the robustness of DH operations, such as cybersecurity, dependability and resilience. Illustrating the hardness of devising the right paradigms to implement DH, I will illustrate scholarly results of some state-of-the-art research.