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This paper provides an overview of the range and development of health informatics, with examples from the literature world wide covering the types of information involved, the areas of application, the impact of evidence based medicine and other professional issues, integrated information systems, and the needs of the public, patients and their carers. While medical informatics certainly comprises a major part of health informatics it is not the main focus of this paper. Medical informatics is the older term and involves the use of information technology and computing specifically for medical science research, and the diagnosis and treatment of disease involving, for example, X‐rays, imaging, resonance, and magnetic scanning techniques. Rather, the scope of this review is the literature relating to the wider concept of the management of information through the interdisciplinary application of information science and technology for the benefit of patients, scientists, managers, staff, and carers involved in the whole range of healthcare activity.

The purpose of this review is to provide a conceptual framework of consumer engagement behavior in the value co-creation process of healthcare services, and further understand the current knowledge maps and advances.

Specifically, the scoping review methodology is used to synthesize the extant findings. The authors first develop the inclusion/exclusion criteria to evaluate the source material for the review; then, the authors further conduct the literature refinement to select the final data sample. As such, the authors extract and analyze the information derived from these articles.

The authors found most related studies focus on exploring patients' engagement behavior in the value co-creation process, especially those with chronic disease; the findings also reveal that consumers are most likely to engage in the value co-creation process of healthcare services by seeking or sharing health information; also, consumers engagement behavior is mainly driven by individual, interactive, and technological factors; moreover, consumer engagement in the value co-creation of healthcare services are more likely to achieve positive health and behavioral outcomes.

The role of consumers has gradually shifted from that of passive recipients to that of active participants in the healthcare value co-creation process. Consumer engagement behavior is the key premise for the realization of healthcare value co-creation, and it has received increasing attention both academically and practically. By unearthing the conceptual framework of consumer engagement behavior in the value co-creation process of healthcare services, this study provides a systematic understanding and serves as a useful resource for future research and practice.

This paper argues that while there have been significant advances in the development of consumer health information services over the past decade, there is no room for complacency as we approach the new millennium. If we are to avoid the dangers of complacency, passivity and superficiality we need to develop new skills. The future consumer health information professional will need to be skilled in creating information products, interpreting information needs and reviewing and synthesizing information to support decision making.

In this paper the authors seek to compare lay (consumer) and professional (physician) discourse structures in answers to diabetes‐related questions in a public consumer health information website.

Ten consumer and ten physician question threads were aligned. They generated 26 consumer and ten physician answers, constituting a total dataset of 717 discourse units (in sentences or sentence fragments). The authors depart from previous LIS health information behaviour research by utilizing a computational linguistics‐based theoretical framework of rhetorical structure theory, which enables research at the pragmatics level of linguistics in terms of the goals and effects of human communication.

The authors reveal differences in discourse organization by identifying prevalent rhetorical relations in each type of discourse. Consumer answers included predominately (66 per cent) presentational rhetorical structure relations, those intended to motivate or otherwise help a user do something (e.g. motivation, concession, and enablement). Physician answers included mainly subject matter relations (64 per cent), intended to inform, or simply transfer information to a user (e.g. elaboration, condition, and interpretation).

The findings suggest different communicative goals expressed in lay and professional health information sharing. Consumers appear to be more motivating, or activating, and more polite (linguistically) than physicians in how they share information with consumers online in similar topics in diabetes management. The authors consider whether one source of information encourages adherence to healthy behaviour more effectively than another.

Analysing discourse structure – using rhetorical structure theory – is a novel and promising approach in information behaviour research, and one that traverses the lexico‐semantic level of linguistic analysis towards pragmatics of language use.

Health care has come to a turning point. Particularly due to aging societies and economic pressure placed on health care system, health is rapidly becoming one's own responsibility. This fundamental paradigm shift does not only affect the way health care services that will be provided in the near future but it also places enormous health information management demands on the laypeople. The purpose of this paper is to look into this emerging phenomenon, its current challenges and available solutions.

In order to identify different kinds of solutions used for personal health information management (PHIM) and related challenges, a bibliographical review is conducted using five online databases. The review focuses on articles that emphasize personal nature of the health information management. The bibliographical review is also extended to some of the articles cited in the original review. To support discoveries from the bibliographical review, the results are compared to free electronic personal health records of different types.

The paper identifies some of the most current challenges in the field of PHIM and provides an outline for overcoming them. Proposed guidelines include a concept of citizen pathways (CPs) that can be used for complementing the currently available solutions from a citizen‐centric perspective.

The paper points out near‐future development directions for the PHIM solutions in the form of identified and relevant challenges and characterized CPs. However, the forward‐looking conclusions are based on a bibliographical review and analysis of existing systems, and therefore their functionality and applicability are not tested in practice.

The findings of this paper can be used in shaping PHIM solutions of the near future. The described challenges can also be used to identify potential problems of the internet and new media on a larger scale in the context of health and medical informatics.

In this paper, we introduce feminist technoscience as an approach that will advance theory in information behavior and practice.

In this conceptual paper, we identify four common assumptions in information behavior and information practice research that limit theory development to date. Existing models and theories tend to rely on extractive logic, focus on a person-in-situation, depend on binary definitions and assume that information interaction changes people's lives for the better. This leads to extractive ways of discussing information interactions and limits our ability to fully theorize embodiment and affect in our discipline.

Feminist technoscience offers distinct ways of thinking about people, technology, bodies and power; in doing so, it responds to some perennial limitations in our research to date.

Feminist technoscience is a robust research paradigm that has not yet been fully applied in our discipline. Assumptions in information behavior and information practice research have led to models and theories that reflect a logic of extraction and are limited in their potential for characterizing both embodiment and affect. Feminist technoscience provides a way to conduct research that challenges these assumptions and addresses these limitations.

The purpose of this paper is to gain a general holistic view of implications of the growing and highly relevant customer segment of elder consumers for the food demand chain (food retail, production, logistics, and business informatics) in Germany.

This paper takes a holistic demand-chain approach that is based on interviews with 36 German food consumers aged 65-87 and with 50 experts from manufacturing, trade, logistics, and business informatics as well as a survey with 1,288 consumers above 64 years of age and 682 consumers below 65 years of age.

Physical, statistical, psychological, social, and behavioural characteristics of elder German consumers may influence location, services, and layout of food retail, food variety, sizes, packaging, and labelling, food production, transportation, and storage volumes and capacities, as well as facility location, route, and inventory planning. The social function of grocery shopping especially for single consumers, intergenerational products and services, home-delivery services especially to rural areas, as well as decentralisation and regionalisation are expected to gain importance. Logistics and industry 4.0 can facilitate the efficient and effective supply of food.

This research is the first to investigate the needs and wants of elder German food consumers and their implications for the German food demand chain in a more holistic demand-chain approach.

The rapid development of eHealth requires the extension of existing health informatics competences sets. These competences are needed not only by health-care professionals but also by health-care consumers. The purpose of this paper is to analyse literature production of health informatics and eHealth competences/skills (EHCS).

Bibliometric analysis and mapping have been used as a form of distant reading approach in the manner to perform thematic analysis, identify gaps in knowledge and predict future trends.

This study shows that the literature production of health informatics and EHCS differs in bibliometric indicators, as well as in research content. Thematic analysis showed that medicine is the most productive subject area in both fields. However, health informatics competencies/skills are more oriented toward education, nursing, electronic health record and evidence-based practice, while EHCS cover health information technology, engineering, computer science and patient-centred care. The literature research production exhibits positive trend and is geographically widespread in both fields.

The use of Scopus database might have led to different results if the authors had used Web of Science or Medline, because of the fact that different databases cover different lists of source titles. The authors used various search strings, and the most optimal one for their study; however, a different search string might result in slightly different outcomes. In addition, the thematic analysis has been performed on information source abstracts and titles only, as the analysis of full texts (if available) could lead to different results. Despite the fact that the thematic analysis has been performed by three researchers with different scientific backgrounds, the results of the analysis are subjective. On the other hand, the bibliometric analyses and comparison of health informatics and eHealth competences have never been done before and this study revealed some important gaps in research in both fields.

The World Health Organization defined four distinct but related components of eHealth: mobile health, health information systems, telemedicine and distance learning. While the research in telemedicine and health information systems seems to be well covered, the skills and competencies in mobile health and distant learning should be researched more extensively.

More research in the skills and competencies associated with so-called connected health, a new subfield in eHealth research, is needed. The skills and competencies of how to better implement and use the services related to the management of chronic diseases, health coproduction and how to implement eHealth in developing countries are currently under research areas and with candidates for future research. For both health informatics competencies/skills and EHCS, we noted that more research is needed for personalised medicine, health coproduction, smart health, internet of things, internet of services and intelligent health systems.

The literature production on health informatics and EHCS has been analysed for the first time and been compared in a systemic way, using bibliometrics. The results reveal that current research directions as well as knowledge gaps could thus provide guidelines for further research.

This paper aims to investigate the potentials of virtual reality (VR) for residential real estate marketing to influence house purchase intention.

Based on the relevant literature in consumer behaviour, this study hypothesised the relationships between atmosphere with pleasure and arousal emotions and the subsequent influence of emotions towards house purchase intention in a virtual environment. A within-subjects experimental design was conducted with 60 real potential homebuyers to test the hypotheses. Data were analysed using paired samples t-test and partial least squares-structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM).

Results revealed that there is a significant difference in the atmosphere and house purchase intention between real and virtual environments. On the other hand, pleasure and arousal emotions evoked in real and virtual environments showed no significant difference. The results show that the atmosphere significantly affects pleasure and arousal, where pleasure, in turn, has a significant effect on purchase intention, and arousal showed an insignificant effect on purchase intention in the virtual environment.

Due to budget limitation, this study was constrained to the use of HTC Vive as the VR equipment and evaluation of only one type of housing design.

This study contributes to facilitating the revitalisation of real estate marketing with the integration of VR by providing notable empirical results and recommendations based on the research findings.

This study extends the current knowledge from the stimulus-organism-response framework for a smart real estate marketing strategy using VR.