Biomedical Informatics Methods for Personalized Medicine and Participatory Health

Abstract

New biomedical informatics methods are required to facilitate new models of personalized medicine and participatory health care, which demonstrate enormous potential to exploit advances in technology and knowledge.Personalized medicine describes the advent of a very precise approach to prevention, diagnosis, and therapy-these can now be tailored to groups of individuals, taking into account their molecular fingerprint (genome), phenotype (phenome), and environmental exposure (exposome).Participatory health care is an emerging paradigm in which citizens take active responsibility for their own health-using social media and high-capacity broadband networks for self-tracking and quantifying health status, maintaining and sharing personal health records, and crowdsourcing data for clinical research.This chapter describes and illustrates biomedical informatics methods for collecting data from wearable and environmental sensors, for representing new forms of data in standardized formats, for integrating data from disparate sources, and for analysis and visualization of the large volumes of data, or "big data," that ensue. © 2014 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.