Modeling opportunities in mHealth cyber-physical systems

Cyber-physical systems, with their focus on creating closed-loop sys-tems, have transformed a wide range of areas (e.g., flight systems, industrial plants, robotics, etc.). However, even after a century of health research we still lack dynamic computational models of human health and its interactions with the environment, let alone a full closed-loop cyber-physical system. A major hurdle to developing cyber-physical systems in the medical and health fields has been the lack of high-resolution data on changes in both outcomes and predictive variables in the natural environment. There are many public and private initiatives addressing these measurement issues and the health research community is witnessing rapid progress in this area. Consequently, there is an emerging opportunity to develop cyber-physical systems for mobile health (mHealth). This chapter describes research challenges in developing cyber-physical system models to build effective and safe mHealth interventions. Doing so involves significant advances in modeling of health, biology, and behavior and their interactions with the environment and response of humans to the mHealth interventions.