ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

The History of the Personal Health Device and the Making of Chronic Disease

• In Event: Diagnosing Difference in Biomedicine

English Abstract

Digital health infrastructures like personal health devices, have reshaped what counts as “disease” in contemporary medicine. I argue that these technologies do not simply detect or categorize disease. Instead, the use of these technologies contribute to how we decide what disease is. Investigating the history of these technologies reveals digital health tools as sites of negotiation where institutional priorities, commercial interests, and epistemic norms converge.

I will explore the late 20th century development of personal health devices, including continuous glucose monitors and insulin pumps. Since the 1980s, health care has increasingly moved out of the clinic and into the hands of patients. Personal health devices advertise the ability for patients to track biomarkers like glucose at home. These devices have played a key role in managing chronic diseases like diabetes by providing patients with information about risk: e.g., high glucose signals the potential risk for future organ damage. The personal health device has reframed chronic illness as a matter of tracking and mitigating risk. In doing so, device manufacturers helped coproduce chronic disease, turning risk into a consumer product.
By tracing this history, I show how personal health devices shape diagnostic categories by redefining what data is clinically meaningful. In the context of personal health devices, disease is a continuous state of risk, which must be interpreted against established clinical and pathological criteria. This produces new tensions in diagnostic judgment. Far from neutral instruments, these technologies make visible the political and epistemic dimensions underpinning contemporary diagnostic practice.

Author

• Sloane Wesloh, University of Pittsburgh