Precision medicine (PM) is an emerging approach that appears with the impression of changing the existing paradigm of medical practice. Recent advances in technological innovations and genetics and the growing availability of health data have set a new pace of the research and impose a set of new requirements on the different stakeholders. Some studies are available that discuss about the different aspects of PM. Nevertheless, a holistic representation of those aspects deemed to confer with the technological perspective, in relation to the applications and challenges, have been mostly ignored. In this context, this paper surveys the advances in PM from the informatics viewpoint and reviews the enabling tools and techniques in a categorized manner. In addition, the study discusses how other technological paradigms, which include big data, artificial intelligence, and the internet of things, can be exploited to advance the potentials of PM. Furthermore, the paper provides some guidelines for future research for a seamless implementation and a wide-scale deployment of PM based on the identified open issues and the associated challenges. As a result, the paper proposes an integrated holistic framework for PM motivating informatics researchers to design their relevant research work in an appropriate context.

The provision of health and wellness care is undergoing an enormous transformation. A key element of this revolution consists in prioritizing prevention and proactivity based on the analysis of people’s conducts and the empowerment of individuals in their self-management. Digital technologies are unquestionably destined to be the main engine of this change, with an increasing number of domain-specific applications and devices commercialized every year; however, there is an apparent lack of frameworks capable of orchestrating and intelligently leveraging, all the data, information and knowledge generated through these systems. This work presents Mining Minds, a novel framework that builds on the core ideas of the digital health and wellness paradigms to enable the provision of personalized support. Mining Minds embraces some of the most prominent digital technologies, ranging from Big Data and Cloud Computing to Wearables and Internet of Things, as well as modern concepts and methods, such as context-awareness, knowledge bases or analytics, to holistically and continuously investigate on people’s lifestyles and provide a variety of smart coaching and support services. This paper comprehensively describes the efficient and rational combination and interoperation of these technologies and methods through Mining Minds, while meeting the essential requirements posed by a framework for personalized health and wellness support. Moreover, this work presents a realization of the key architectural components of Mining Minds, as well as various exemplary user applications and expert tools to illustrate some of the potential services supported by the proposed framework. Mining Minds constitutes an innovative holistic means to inspect human behavior and provide personalized health and wellness support. The principles behind this framework uncover new research ideas and may serve as a reference for similar initiatives.