Digital Technologies and Disease Prevention.

In the last 3 decades or so, digital technologies have penetrated into a vast array of human activities; smartphones, computers, Internet, social media, and the rest have not only reached into many domains of everyday life but also spread globally and very rapidly— at a speed that technologies from previous eras had not done. In this special themed issue of the American Journal of Preventive Medicine, a series of papers explore some of the implications of digital technologies for disease prevention and public health. Presently, the potential for such interventions appears to be extensive, including surveillance of population information, continuous self-monitoring of bodily signs, symptoms, and measures, through prompts to assist and support behavior changes to provision of advice and guidance about lifestyle and health risks. There are a number of questions that deserve detailed scientific attention, and the papers in this volume contribute to that consideration. First, unintended consequences: The inventors, pioneers, innovators, and advocates of earlier technical revolutions did not foresee with too much accuracy the direction that their new technologies would take. The printing press, the steam engine, canals, the electric motor, the postage stamp, TV, and railways were not originally devised with anything like full knowledge of all the many diverse ways in which these technologies would eventually develop and subsequently shape society. The technologies went in directions of their own. So it seems likely, given that it is comparatively early days in respect of digital technologies applied to disease prevention, that some of the uses we imagine for digital technologies now will appear to succeeding generations to be quaintly misguided. We have yet to see the way these technologies eventually get used on a regular and sustained basis. That these technologies will have uses and effects for good or ill is clear; what we don’t know is what those benefits and