Digital health and a new drug discovery

We are facing an industrial revolution in the era of Big Data and artificial intelligence (AI) which affects all fields, including biomedicine. This was possible thanks to the capability to store a great amount of data and to the growing speed of computers which are able to perform more operations in a shorter time. This industrial revolution started first in society and in the relationship between people, driven by commonly used social media, and has finally reached medicine, where it is changing our approach to understanding and fighting diseases. Data sets grow rapidly in part because they are increasingly gathered by cheap and numerous informationsensing internet devices such as mobile phones. These technologies are entering in medicine too, speeding up the collection and increasing the amount of data. For instance, epidemic surveillance can now rely on large but low-quality data from social media to complement traditional public health approaches. Algorithms for automatic image analysis are rapidly outperforming trained humans in the classification of certain types of cancers or cognitive disorders including Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, etc.