Infodemiology: a New Presence Concept in Human Information Interaction Based on Eysenbach’s View

Abstract

This research aims to study the presence contexts of infodemiology and the introduction and expansion of its framework. Based on Eysenbach’s View, infodemiology can be defined as the science of distribution and determinants of information in an electronic medium, specifically the Internet, or in a population, with the ultimate aim to inform public health and public policy. In this review article, library method has been used to define and describe the term “infodemiology” and its dimensions. In this study after an introduction investigating the present setting, and defining the concept of infodemiology, the framework of this science and its measurements has been studied and finally the relationship between infodemiology and public health has been described. According to the results, digital media technologies resulted in paradigm shift in choosing the ways in which people search their health information. The researches in this domain have been resulted in credible and significant measurements to track health information supply and demand. Also, infodemiological researches cause specialists design and develop health information databanks based on given measurements. The studies show that there is the possibility of applying some measurements as alarm systems for proliferating infection diseases or presence of new diseases. These measurements are called “infodemiology measurements” which reflect supply-based infodemiology and demand-based infodemiology. According to these, data collecting in this field and using its measurements could be useful in policy-making.

Keywords

• Infodemiology
• Information Supply
• Information Demand
• Public Health
• Data-based Information Dissemination