Health Sciences: Contemporary Health

This course focuses on the exploration of major health issues and behaviors in the various dimensions of health. Emphasis is placed on individual responsibility for personal health and the promotion of informed, positive health behaviors. Topics include nutrition, exercise, weight control, mental health, stress management, violence, substance abuse, reproductive health, disease prevention, aging, health care, and environmental hazards and safety.

This collection of essays explores cultural narratives of care in the contexts of ageing and illness.

While it has become fashionable in the arena of international health to think about health systems, the theoretical underpinning of Niklas Luhmann's vast and productive theory has been given too little consideration in the field. It is rich in concepts that can facilitate a fuller understanding of what health systems are. João Costa applies these concepts and shows the analytical possibilities they open up. He argues concisely how Luhmann's Social Systems Theory offers an integrated theoretical body as well as a consistent articulation of concepts that can lay the groundwork for a vastly improved health systems thinking.

This open access book presents the rise of technology-enabled methods and tools for objective, quantitative assessment of Quality of Life (QoL), while following the WHOQOL model. It is an in-depth resource describing and examining state-of-the-art, minimally obtrusive, ubiquitous technologies. Highlighting the required factors for adoption and scaling of technology-enabled methods and tools for QoL assessment, it also describes how these technologies can be leveraged for behavior change, disease prevention, health management and long-term QoL enhancement in populations at large. Quantifying Quality of Life: Incorporating Daily Life into Medicine fills a gap in the field of QoL by providing assessment methods, techniques and tools. These assessments differ from the current methods that are now mostly infrequent, subjective, qualitative, memory-based, context-poor and sparse. Therefore, it is an ideal resource for physicians, physicians in training, software and hardware developers, computer scientists, data scientists, behavioral scientists, entrepreneurs, healthcare leaders and administrators who are seeking an up-to-date resource on this subject.