Exposome, health and biomedical informatics: An emerging discipline and its interaction with current biomedical informatics

In the last decade we have witnessed the raising of the exposome (the set of a life-long individual exposures) as an increasingly interesting area and discipline due to its relationship with health. These new approaches rely heavily in the use of different informatics related methods and are generating new data types that in the future should be handled by biomedical informatics. This position paper refers to some of the challenges that are related with these new approaches from a biomedical informatics perspective, describing the interactions with related disciplines such as bioinformatics, public health informatics and others. We discuss as well the role of the exposome in bringing new data types that might be handled by biomedical informatics in the context of Big and small data generated in this approaches and its relationship with the participatory medicine and how they could influence future health information systems. Finally, we consider that the current situation of the exposome resembles the early years of genomics, when it was clear that genomic information had a great potential for health and drove a discussion about how to better integrate and analyse the most relevant pieces of information for health purposes.