Glossary on Core Terms for the LeibnizScience Campus Digital Public Health

Motivation
Recent technological development has provided unprecedented opportunities to transform the health sector and improve the well-being of the population, to make public health response more effective, and to enable public interest and engagement in taking charge of their own health. However, the successful development, integration and implementation of digital technology and methods in public health require a shift from traditional and single disciplinary approaches. Digital public health (DiPH) spans across disciplines including computer science, information science, public health, epidemiology, participatory science, law, philosophy and so on. Only when investigated together incorporating various disciplinary knowledge, digital public health will be in a position to create results with significant impact on improving the well-being of individuals and population. In the similar vein, proponents of digital public health agree that by drawing upon an interdisciplinary field of research, the challenges and opportunities of digitalization in public health can be better understood and can be ultimately addressed. However, interdisciplinary research and collaboration also means that researchers may face conceptual and terminological fuzziness as oftentimes the same terms are used in different disciplines with different meanings. This may lead to lack of consensus and common understanding on the relevant terms and concepts in DiPH, eventually making such interdisciplinary research effort challenging for researchers.
Aim
This glossary aims to facilitate interdisciplinary communication and understanding among researchers on terms and concepts relevant in the field of DiPH. The focus here is to identify core terms that are deemed relevant in the field of DiPH and to define them through interdisciplinary perspectives
List of core terms and their working definitions
- Health and Public Health
- Digital Health and Digital Public Health
- Digital Health Literacy and Digital Public Health Literacy
- Health and Medical App
- Digital Health Equality and Digital Health Equity
- Digital Public Health Intervention

How is the digitization affecting our health?
Steps followed to prepare this glossary
