Speculation and Innovation in Digital Health - I

Abstract

From mobile health applications used at home and on the go, to the increasing use of predictive analytics in biomedicine, innovations in digital health technology offer myriad ways to document, predict, and manage health risk. Simultaneously, digital health start-ups such as Fitbit are built on profit-making models even as they attempt to redefine practices of care. These changes are occurring in a landscape where access to affordable healthcare is a dominant political question and the idea of right to healthcare as a public good has come center stage. This panel will analyze the social and ethical implications of digital health given the intersection of speculative logic and entrepreneurial capitalism. Firstly, it will examine the ways these technologies use speculative logics to not only manage risk, but create new categories of risk and reshape our existing conceptions of the landscape of health risk. Secondly, as several economies struggle with providing affordable public healthcare, this panel examines how digital health embeds itself in the ethic of neoliberal self-governance as individuals are encouraged to track bodily measures, observe changes and manage themselves. Lastly, this panel will discuss the emergence of new actors in healthcare and how that can be understood within the context of both neoliberal capitalism and discourses of health as a public good. Papers can examine the creation of entrepreneurial actors within digital health, the ways in which these developments create categories of health risk and shape who is responsible for mitigating that risk. Papers should be grounded in theory that accounts for neoliberal shaping of healthcare practices and how the ethos or both spoken and unspoken priorities (e.g., profit, efficiency, etc.) underlying these developments impacts the idea of healthcare as a public good.

Chair

• Ipshita Ghosh, Syracuse University

Discussant

• Kadija Ferryman, Data & Society

Individual Presentations

• FemTech: “Smart” Innovation or the Commodification of Women’s Health? - Jessica Lee Mathiason, University of Maryland

• Migraine Buddy: The Profitability of Migraineurs' Pain - Christiana Robbins, University of Southern California

• Making Good(s): Digital Health, Speculation, and Care - Ipshita Ghosh, Syracuse University

• Innovating Biomedical Markets for Social Justice: Potentials and Limits of Technical Democracy to Reduce Inequality - Ilaria Galasso, University College Dublin; Susi Geiger, University College Dublin

• "All Power to the Imagination!" Virtual Reality Therapy in France: A Therapeutic Innovation between Technology and Care (2012–2017) - Elsa Forner, EHESS (Paris, France)

Session Organizer

• Ipshita Ghosh, Syracuse University