Optimising cohort data in Europe

of worldwide health issues. Geospatial and positioning technologies and remote sensing present a number of threats including: y y Lack of awareness impeding adoption. y y Lack of the required specialised skill set, knowledge and understanding. y y Privacy and data protection concerns. y y Gap in adoption between developed and emerging economies. y y Rapid technology evolution means GIS systems quickly becoming obsolete. y y Fairly expensive for remote sensing, especially when measuring small areas. y y Remote sensing needs manual interpretation that requires specialised expertise, and instruments may be uncalibrated, leading to uncalibrated data. As modern technology continues to thrive, medical GIS will remain a lasting approach for understanding populations and the world we live in. The future will see sensor data processed more effectively and automatically, location‐based applications developed and high volumes of unstructured data integrated. Improvements in accuracy will be driven by an increased dependency on location information and consumer demand for geographical accuracy. Collaboration between different sources is likely to increase over the next five to ten years, with GIS having a greater importance in tomorrow’s increasingly information-intensive healthcare environment. With the availability of large amounts of multidimensional data, new techniques are emerging that apply these data to a wide range of applications, such as holistic systems suitable for complex health studies. References Ali J, DiStefano MJ, Coates McCall I, Gibson DG, Al Kibria GM, et al. Ethics of mobile phone surveys to monitor non-communicable disease risk factors in low- and middle-income countries: A global stakeholder survey. Global Public Health 201914(8):1167-1181. https://doi/org/10.1080/17441692.2019.1566482 Alshaikh F, Ramzan F, Rawaf S, Majeed A. Social network sites as a mode to collect health data: a systematic review. Journal of Medical Internet Research 2014;16(7):e171. https://doi.org/10.2196/jmir.3050 Ambrosini A, Calabrese D, Avato FM, Catania F, Cavaletti G, Pera MC, Toscano A, Vita G, Monaco L, Pareyson D. The Italian neuromuscular registry: a coordinated platform where patient organizations and clinicians collaborate for data collection and multiple usage. Orphanet Journal of Rare Diseases 2018 Oct 4;13(1):176. https://doi. org/10.1186/s13023-018-0918-z Arc User. GIS for health care today and tomorrow. Available online: https://www.esri. com/news/arcuser/0499/umbrella.html (accessed June 14, 2022).