Digital Resilience Biomarkers for Personalized Health Maintenance and Disease Prevention

Abstract

Health maintenance and disease prevention strategies become increasingly prioritized with increasing health and economic burden of chronic, lifestyle-related diseases. A key element in these strategies is the empowerment of individuals to control their health. Self-measurement plays an essential role in achieving such empowerment. Digital measurements have the advantage of being measured non-invasively, passively, continuously, and in a real-world context. An important question is whether such measurement can sensitively measure subtle disbalances in the progression toward disease, as well as the subtle effects of, for example, nutritional improvement. The concept of resilience biomarkers, defined as the dynamic evaluation of the biological response to an external challenge, has been identified as a viable strategy to measure these subtle effects. In this review, we explore the potential of integrating this concept with digital physiological measurements to come to digital resilience biomarkers. Additionally, we discuss the potential of wearable, non-invasive, and continuous measurement of molecular biomarkers. These types of innovative measurements may, in the future, also serve as a digital resilience biomarker to provide even more insight into the personal biological dynamics of an individual. Altogether, digital resilience biomarkers are envisioned to allow for the measurement of subtle effects of health maintenance and disease prevention strategies in a real-world context and thereby give personalized feedback to improve health.

A systems approach towards remote health-monitoring in older adults: Introducing a zero-interaction digital exhaust

“…Despite the positives, our findings also suggest that, at least with the presented digital measures and zero-interaction technologies, some modalities may not be easily assessed, such as in our case the assessment of late-life depression. Eventually, we thus believe that the presented digital exhaust has the potential to serve as a baseline set of measures that may be calculated over long time frames (ranging from years to potentially decades), but which could also be supplemented (potentially over shorter time periods) with digital measures based on more specific sensors, such as pillbox sensors, wearables, smartphones, or even non-invasive biomolecular sensors (for instance on the basis of sweat 68 or saliva 69 ), depending on the specific needs, circumstances, and conditions. In clinical care, a baseline set of digital measures could make for a first defense, a basic monitoring layer that helps to indicate when more elaborate, but also more obtrusive and potentially expensive, measurement modalities are necessary (be it based on specific sensing devices, such as a Holter electrocardiogram, or more biological modalities like blood panels or even multi-omics profiling).…”

Digital Phenotyping in Livestock Farming

“…Certain forms of phenotyping have been used effectively to assess the resilience of an organism to pathogenic and environmental stressors, including events such as heat stress [19]. The more resilient members of a livestock group can then be singled out based on their phenotype analysis and used to proliferate their positive traits.…”

“…Sweat is a form of moisture loss that is directly associated with heat tolerance. The composition of sweat also explains physiological processes happening within an animal through the compounds it contains, such as lactate, an indicator of physical stress [19,36].…”

Digital Phenotyping in Livestock Farming

“…Certain forms of phenotyping have been used effectively to assess the resilience of an organism to pathogenic and environmental stressors, including events like heat stress [16]. The more resilient members of a livestock group can then be singled out based on their phenotype analysis and used to proliferate their positive traits.…”

“…Sweat is a form of moisture loss that is directly associated with heat tolerance. The composition of sweat also explains physiological processes happening within an animal through the compounds it contains, such as lactate, an indicator of physical stress [16,32].…”