Emerging role of eHealth in the identification of very early inflammatory rheumatic diseases.

Digital health or eHealth technologies, notably pervasive computing, robotics, big-data, wearable devices, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), have opened unprecedented opportunities as to how the diseases are diagnosed and managed with active patient engagement. Patient-related data have provided insights (real world data) into understanding the disease processes. Advanced analytics have refined these insights further to draw dynamic algorithms aiding clinicians in making more accurate diagnosis with the help of machine learning. AI is another tool, which, although is still in the evolution stage, has the potential to help identify early signs even before the clinical features are apparent. The evolving digital developments pose challenges on allowing access to health-related data for further research but, at the same time, protecting each patient's privacy. This review focuses on the recent technological advances and their applications and highlights the immense potential to enable early diagnosis of rheumatological diseases.