Precision Digital Health

Abstract

Accounting for individual and situational heterogeneity (i.e., precision) is now an important area of research and treatment in the field of medicine. This essay argues that precision should also be embraced within digital health artifacts, such as by designing digital health apps to tailor recommendations to individual user characteristics, needs, and situations, rather than only providing generic advice. The challenge, however, is that not much guidance is available for embracing precision when designing or researching digital health artifacts. The paper suggests that a shift toward precision in digital health will require embracing heterogeneous treatment effects (HTEs), which are variations in the effectiveness of treatment, such as variations in effects for individuals of different ages. Embracing precision via HTEs is not trivial, however, and will require new approaches to the research and design of digital health artifacts. Thus, this essay seeks to not only define precision digital health, but also to offer suggestions as to where and how machine learning, deep learning, and artificial intelligence can be used to enhance the precision of interventions provisioned via digital health artifacts (e.g., personalized advice from mental health wellbeing apps). The study emphasizes the value of applying emerging causal ML methods and generative AI features within digital health artifacts toward the goal of increasing the effectiveness of digitially provisioned interventions.