## 4 Discussion  
Health pods are a new concept that aim at gaining an ambitious positioning in the future of healthcare services. These systems are spreading as solutions for distributed health assessment points, useful for population screening or for chronicity management, and even in the COVID era, as a sensing point to assess and monitor the epidemiologic diffusion of the pandemic through specific parameters. The main idea is to provide in easily accessible sites quantified information about the health status of users and to engage them in improving and taking care of their health, thus implementing in the real-world the concept of distributed medicine with a clinical service closer to citizens and to where they live. Hospitals, pharmacies, shopping malls, gyms, and even supermarkets could be furnished with medical pods that can provide the first screening for health problems in a few minutes. It is necessary to point out that these systems cannot provide a diagnosis (which is a medical responsibility of a clinical doctor) but only a set of clinical-grade measurements and their positioning in the frame of a set of normality ranges. As most of the solutions also exploit cloud services, once the user has carried out the measurements, the results are stored in a data cloud that can then be easily shared with healthcare professionals. When the collected information is shared with medical facilities, health pods could enable early diagnosis and prevention services. From this perspective, health pods could represent a strategic opportunity to build a phygital health ecosystem that empowers people to healthy behaviors and enables the 5P medicine era. In fact, they implement four out of the five dimensions of the P5 medicine vision: participative, preventive predictive, and personalized health management, even thanks to pluri-experts' opinions that will prevent pathologies and predict/reduce risks. A joint marketplace could complete the offer of preventive or consultation or monitoring intervention services, for example, by integrating the health pod system with wearables or AI to have a continuous and real-time lifestyle check and support. The information and the awareness about own health status and the education toward the strategies, actions, and measures on how to improve it represents the main goal of subject empowerment toward a 5P medicine. Indeed, empowerment of people for becoming co-producers and co-managers of their own health starts with awareness, and only through this strategic action can the motivation to prevention could be engaged. This is an active countermeasure to aging decline, chronic disease management, well-being promotion, prevention, and early diagnosis. In fact, the possibility to self-measure parameters related to the presence/absence of pathologies and/or comorbidities, or only as simple risk factors, in relation to the different age ranges, could help identify personalized situations and interventions. According to the lifestyle medicine paradigm, a direct correlation between the signals measured through the health pods and different risk of pathologies (Figure 6 shows the main ones) is known, and their individual assessment could allow designing specific and personalized protocols for prevention strategies. They could even work jointly with the recent concept of personal digital health hub, an integrator and interpreter of useful health information capable of collecting data from different health services and other personalized digital data sources [28] to support and empower patients to take greater control of their health goals in innovative models of care. Moreover, in a prevention vision, this approach requires a redesign of digital health solutions that will allow the co-participation and delivery of high-quality and patient-centered health services in her/his community setting.