Digital Public Health: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

This comprehensive open access book gives an overview of the core issues in digital public health, with a strong emphasis on prevention, population health, and health systems. It covers a broad spectrum of topics, ranging from theoretical frameworks to legal and ethical issues related to digital public health applications and interventions. With chapters on user-centered technology development, evaluation, participatory approaches in digital public health, and global digital public perspectives, it also presents examples taken from ten essential public health operations. Targeted at researchers in academia, industry, and government, this unique text offers a broad insight into digitalization, a central topic in the current development of public health worldwide.

Hajo Zeeb is a medical doctor and professor of epidemiology at the University of Bremen and the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology-BIPS in Germany. He has more than 20 years of health research experience in environmental and social epidemiology, as well as prevention and intervention research. He has served as speaker of the interdisciplinary Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health Bremen (LSC DiPH) since 2018 and is involved in numerous digital public health research projects and initiatives at national and international level.

Laura Maaß is a public health researcher at the University of Bremen with a focus on digital public health system maturity. She has been the leader of the Early Career Researcher Academy of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health since 2020. Since 2022, she has been the speaker for the digital public health section of the German Public Health Association and supports the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER) in developing a digital public health core curriculum for academic public health programs in Europe.

Tanja Schultz is Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bremen since 2015, where she and her team advance artificial intelligence (AI) methods to create human-centered technical systems that interpret users’ biosignals to automatically adapt to their needs. Since 2019, she has been a member of the Board of Directors of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health, the spokesperson for the university high-profile area “Minds, Media, Machines”, and since 2022, the spokesperson for the DFG research unit “Lifespan AI” – a joint project of the University Bremen and BIPS.

Ulrike Haug is Professor of Clinical Epidemiology and Pharmacoepidemiology at the University of Bremen and head of the department Clinical Epidemiology at the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS, Germany. Her research focuses on primary prevention and early detection of cancer, as well as on drug utilization and safety. She has been a member of the Board of Directors of the LSC DiPH since 2022.

Iris Pigeot is Professor of Statistics with Focus on Biometry and Methods in Epidemiology at the University of Bremen. Since 2004, she has been the director of the Leibniz Institute for Prevention Research and Epidemiology – BIPS in Bremen, Germany. Her research activities focus on use of secondary data in pharmaceutical drug safety, statistical analyses of large epidemiological studies, digital public health as well as statistical and privacy issues related to data sharing, federated data analyses, record linkage and the establishment of research data infrastructures. She has served as a member of the Board of Directors of the LSC DiPH since 2018.

Benjamin Schüz is Professor of Public Health (Prevention and Health Promotion) at the University of Bremen. His research focuses on understanding and modifying social differences in health-related behaviors and on digital as well as analogue health information. Since 2018, he is co-speaker of the Leibniz ScienceCampus Digital Public Health Bremen.