Artificial Intelligence Applications in Tracking Health Behaviors During Disease Epidemics

The threat of emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases to global population health remains significantly enormous, and the pandemic preparedness capabilities necessary to confront such threats must be of greater potency. Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers new hope in not only effectively pre-empting, preventing and combating the threats of infectious disease epidemics, but also facilitating the understanding of health-seeking behaviors and public emotions during epidemics. From a systems-thinking perspective, and in today’s world of seamless boundaries and global interconnectivity, AI offers enormous potential for public health practitioners and policy makers to revolutionize healthcare and population health through focussed, context-specific interventions that promote cost-savings on therapeutic care, expand access to health information and services, and enhance individual responsibility for their health and well-being. This chapter systematically appraises the dawn of AI technology towards empowering population health to combat the rise of infectious disease epidemics.