Technology-based health promotion: Current state and perspectives in emerging gig economy

Publication date: Available online 12 August 2019Source: Biocybernetics and Biomedical EngineeringAuthor(s): Jafet Morales, Devasena Inupakutika, Sahak Kaghyan, David Akopian, Zenong Yin, Deborah Parra-Medina, Martin EvansAbstractIt has been a decade since smartphone application stores started allowing developers to post their own applications. This paper presents a narrative review on the state-of-the-art and the future of the technology used by researchers in the field of health promotion, which very often uses smartphones. In this area, researchers build high cost, complex systems with the purpose of promoting health and collecting data for primary data analysis. These systems promote health by using a feedback component that “educates” the subject. When performing secondary data analysis, the researcher instead uses platforms which provide data collected by others. In this case, the researcher is limited in the sense that he/she has no control over the data collection process, and there is no feedback channel to communicate with the data-generating subjects, but the price to be paid for the data is much less. Obviously, this second type of systems cannot be used directly for health promotion. However, such systems are globally available, as opposed to the typical system created by a team of researchers for primary data analysis. Both types of systems are relevant to the field of health promotion, given that they are the precursors of a third type of systems that are r...
Source: Biocybernetics and Biomedical Engineering - Category: Biomedical Engineering Source Type: research