Meeting report: microbes as safeguards of the environment.

The challenges of aging populations and noncommunicable diseases across society have led to increased demands and stress on health care systems. Digital health technologies are seen as an enabler to solving such challenges. A review of telemedicine for chronic diseases revealed that wearable devices can help improve the management of chronic conditions by allowing for continuous monitoring of vital signs and reducing patient loads from hospitals [], thereby improving the delivery of health care services. However, digital health technologies and consumer health care technologies are still facing hurdles in entering the integrated clinical market due to several factors such as infrastructure, technical training, and legal and ethics-related barriers []. Digital health technologies pave the path toward more personalized health care, and a key enabler to this end is the use of patient-generated health data (PGHD). The rise of the Quantified Self movement led by people who track many kinds of data about themselves [,], followed by the mass market adoption of self-tracking technologies, coupled with advancements in mobile sensing technologies, has led to an increase in patients bringing their health data to clinical consultations via patient-initiated or clinician-initiated tracking [,]. PGHD refers to data created, recorded, or gathered by patients (or by family members or other caregivers) to help address one’s health concerns []. Notably, PGHD excludes data from electronic health records (EHRs), records entered by health care professionals (HCPs), and patient-reported outcomes. The integration of PGHD has been known to bring about benefits such as (1) [], (2) [], and (3) [,]. Although PGHD has the potential to play a key role in the digitalization of health care, several challenges [] lie in the path toward the adoption of PGHD as a foundation for enabling novel and additional insights and applications in clinical practice. Unlike traditional clinical data, which is typically produced through the actions of HCPs in tightly controlled clinical conditions, PGHD are usually gathered throughout situated daily living under strongly varying and individual circumstances. This poses challenges for the interpretation and reliability of PGHD with varying quality [], but also opens opportunities in the form of “objective data windows” into daily living that would otherwise not be available. Akin to medical and health information being available through internet search [], PGHD integration in patient journeys and clinical workflows is likely to impact medical examination and shared decision-making (SDM)—the collaborative process between an HCP and a patient to make health-related decisions [,] serving as a cornerstone of person-centered care.