Making Good(s): Digital Health, Speculation, and Care

• In Event: Speculation and Innovation in Digital Health - I

Abstract

Digital health entrepreneurs locate their work at the intersection of speculative profit and public good. Accordingly, technologies such as self-tracking devices, personalized fitness programs and monitoring apps, are hailed as potential solutions to healthcare gaps within policy circles. In this paper, I examine how digital health entrepreneurs recreate care practices and the ethical impacts of their work.
This paper is based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork with digital health entrepreneurs in New York and Delhi. I make two interrelated arguments. Firstly, digital health is driven by venture capital which channels innovation and conceptualizes the ideal consumer. This leads to a plethora of healthcare products being created for and marketed to local and global socio-economic elites, thus increasing existing health inequities. Secondly, this wide range of products construct a wellness industry that counters the idea of healthcare as a public good. While accessibility and affordability of good quality healthcare remain potent questions within these democratic regimes, the wellness industry roots care practices into the neoliberal framework of self-management. As proponents of personalized care, digital health entrepreneurs reconstruct paradigms of self-management and create a narrative of entrepreneurial humanitarianism within the bioethical complex.
This paper has at least two implications that calls for further research. One, it examines the socio-ethical consequences of the rise of health entrepreneurs as actors who seek to combine profit and public good. Two, contributing to scholarship in STS, it critiques the impacts of emerging digital health technologies, when mediated through the prism of entrepreneurial capitalism.

Author

• Ipshita Ghosh, Syracuse University