The Master’s Degree in Informatics for Digital Health is open admission and offers courses taught in English to enhance the attractiveness to international students and to provide all participants with a “vocabulary” aligned with the needs of the (global) job market. The area of education will focus on Digital Health, specifically on methodologies, principles, foundations, and technical skills of Computer Science, considering that data management and processing (to produce information and then knowledge) plays and will play an increasingly significant role in the systematic and systemic transformation of the complex “health value” chain – which includes, among others, monitoring, diagnosis, treatment, wellness, care – and research in the biomedical, pharma, wellness/wellbeing, sports, and nutrition sectors.

The goal is to train professionals who have a critical understanding, knowledge, and skills (in terms of design, implementation, evaluation, experimentation, prototyping, and valorization) of computer science methodologies and technologies for studying and solving complex and interdisciplinary problems that arise in the field of health, pharma, nutraceuticals, wellness, and sports, with the aim of improving the quality of offerings and services (also in the context of a smart hospital), the efficiency and effectiveness of the results achieved, focusing on the personalization of care, assistance, monitoring, evaluation, and valorization of the patient, or more generally, of the user of all ages. In this educational context, particular attention is given to offering training on the entire “software stack” (from infrastructure to interfaces) for the development of applications and platforms that must be integrated, interoperable, resilient (in cloud, but not only), distributed, secure, robust, scalable, intelligent, and predictive; and, on the other hand, capable of managing a huge amount of heterogeneous (multi-modal) data collected from citizens-patients-assisted-users-athletes, both in person and remotely.

A defining element of the new Master’s degree is the presence of multi/interdisciplinary courses that provide students not only with the necessary computer science competencies and knowledge to achieve the “professionalism” required in the Digital Health sector but also with full awareness of the specificities, needs, and methodologies of this sector. A distinctive feature of the Master’s degree is the close collaboration (co-teaching) between professors in the computer science area and colleagues/professionals in the bio-medical, pharma, bio-engineering, and economic-legal sectors. Moreover, each course will include significant laboratory activity on state-of-the-art SW libraries and domain-specific data. The program will conclude with a targeted educational activity involving the analysis, design, and implementation of Digital Health applications in which students will engage in the development of software projects proposed by faculty and professionals in the biomedical sector, which may be further explored in their thesis work.

Equally important for graduates of this Master’s degree is the opportunity to take the “Esame di Stato” for the qualification to practice as an engineer (Ingegnere sezione A).