Citizen Health Science: Foundations of a New Data Science Arena

Citizen scientists with health interests have rapidly increased efforts to conduct their own health studies on themselves and in their communities, giving rise to a new transdisciplinary field of citizen health science. This science leverages long-standing traditions of single case or N-of-1 studies in psychology and also finds influential roots in the history of self-experimentation in health and medicine. These studies frequently incorporate new digital tools such as smartphone tracking and many other mobile health or "mHealth" devices. Citizen health scientists also tend to operate in social networks of people working to maintain or improve their health, increasing the complexity and richness of opportunities tied to this new platform. Population data scientists are well-positioned to seek new ways to derive scientific inferences from data generated in citizen health science projects. This paper provides an overview of citizen health science for population data scientists, including basic definitions, historical foundations, current challenges and opportunities, and future directions.