Health and medical behavior informatics

Behavior matters, and behavior informatics is the approach to discover and apply behavior intelligence and value for behavior-related problem-solving and interventions. Health behavior research and behavioral medicine take a behavior-centric approach and have been explored for decades in the health and medical communities. However, understanding, analyzing, and managing health and medical behavior from an informatics perspective has not been systematically explored, with very limited progress made. In this paper, we discuss the research areas, concepts, research topics, and applications of health behavior informatics and medical behavior informatics. A conceptual framework of health and medical behavior informatics is introduced, together with a brief overview of behavior informatics. We focus on the discussion opportunities of health and medical behavior informatics, and their connections to health behavior research, behavioral medicine, and data science and artificial intelligence.