science

Health web science

Health web science is a science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand Health web science rather than just read about it. In short: Health Web Science (HWS) is a sub-discipline of Web Science that examines the interplay between health sciences, health and well-being, and the World Wide Web. It assumes that each domain influences the others.

Key takeaways

Health web science belongs to science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect Health web science to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of Health web science from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

Health Web Science (HWS) is a sub-discipline of Web Science that examines the interplay between health sciences, health and well-being, and the World Wide Web. It assumes that each domain influences the others. HWS thus complements and overlaps with Medicine 2.0 (medicine enabled by emerging technologies). Research has uncovered emergent properties that arise as individuals interact with each other, with healthcare providers and with the Web itself.

History HWS began at the Web Science Curriculum meeting in the summer of 2010 at the University of Southampton where approximately forty scholars came together to discuss the subject. That was followed by a foundational Workshop in Koblenz 2011 under the aegis of ACM. The dialogue to more precisely define HWS as a sub-discipline of Web Science began among Web-oriented investigators at the 2012 Medicine 2.0 Conference and was formalized in 2013. This nascent discipline of Health Web Science is further described and developed in the monograph "Health Web Science". A call to action at the ACM Web Science workshop asked the community to consider how to accelerate the discipline. In particular, beyond the available knowledge-gathering technologies (e.g. blogs, social-medicine portals, experience mining, graph theory, network analysis, and game theory), what additional is required to deal with the Health Web's emergent properties? For example, what is needed to curate, interrogate, and visualize the combination of both 'Big Data' – arising from the increasingly pervasive sources and sensors including "the Internet of things, the quantified self, smart cities, and smart homes – and smaller-scale data arising from individual patient conversations, self-reporting, and self-exploration. How are small-scale innovations safely and efficiently scaled up to the size of the Web and scaled out to millions of patients? One research group argued for technologies that enable predictive, personalized, preventive, and participatory (P4) medicine. Other stated needs include an "Expert Patient" capable of making sense of online medical information in a personal context, tools to cope with information overload through e.g., text mining and semantic technologies, in particular through algorithm-aided decision making.

Health web observatory At the Medicine 2.0 European meeting in 2014, the case was made for the need to design bespoke health web observatories. The Web Science Trust introduced the concept of a Web observatory, as an integrated collection of data sources and analysis tools that enables observation and experimentation for Web study, and positioned it to bridge the gap between big data analytics and the data. A Health Web observatory, therefore, gathers and links health data on the Web (big data and broad data) in order to answer questions. This facilitates the 'Healthcare Singularity' where bench-to-bedside and experiment-to-practice becomes instantaneous. HWS combines the axiom of 'first do no harm' (Hippocrates) with 'do no evil' (Google), paying specific attention to technology and safeguards.

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with Health web science

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what Health web science claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to Health web science before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about Health web science ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of Health web science

In research: Health web science appears in science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses Health web science in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: Health web science is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics Emergence, Health websites, Internet culture, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for Health web science outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study Health web science in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what Health web science means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain Health web science out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is Health web science in simple terms?

Why does Health web science matter?

Because it connects several science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study Health web science?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on Health web science.