Download or read book Quantified Lives and Vital Data written by Rebecca Lynch and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-05 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book raises questions about the changing relationships between technology, people and health. It examines the accelerating pace of technological development and a general shift to personalized, patient-led medicine. Such relationships are increasingly mediated through particular medical technologies, drawn together by the authors as ‘personal medical devices’ (PMDs) – devices that are attached to, worn by, interacted with, or carried by individuals for the purposes of generating biomedical data and carrying out medical interventions on the person concerned. The burgeoning PMD field is advancing rapidly across multiple domains and disciplines – so rapidly that conceptual and empirical research and thinking around PMDs, and their clinical, social and philosophical implications, often lag behind new technical developments and medical interventions. This timely and original volume explores the significant and under-researched impact of personal medical devices on contemporary understandings of health and illness. It will be a valuable read for scholars and practitioners of medicine, health, science and technology and social science.
Download or read book Self Tracking written by Btihaj Ajana and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-10-01 with total page 155 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides an empirical and philosophical investigation of self-tracking practices. In recent years, there has been an explosion of apps and devices that enable the data capturing and monitoring of everyday activities, behaviours and habits. Encouraged by movements such as the Quantified Self, a growing number of people are embracing this culture of quantification and tracking in the spirit of improving their health and wellbeing. The aim of this book is to enhance understanding of this fast-growing trend, bringing together scholars who are working at the forefront of the critical study of self-tracking practices. Each chapter provides a different conceptual lens through which one can examine these practices, while grounding the discussion in relevant empirical examples. From phenomenology to discourse analysis, from questions of identity, privacy and agency to issues of surveillance and tracking at the workplace, this edited collection takes on a wide, and yet focused, approach to the timely topic of self-tracking. It constitutes a useful companion for scholars, students and everyday users interested in the Quantified Self phenomenon.
Download or read book Sensing Health written by Mikki Kressbach and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2024-02-28 with total page 303 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the age of Apple Watches and Fitbits, the concept of “health” emerges through an embodied experience of a digital health device or platform, not simply through the biomedical data it provides. Sensing Health: Bodies, Data, and Digital Health Technologies analyzes popular digital health technologies as aesthetic experiences to understand how these devices and platforms have impacted the way individuals perceive their bodies, behaviors, health, and well-being. By tracing design alongside embodied experiences of digital health, Kressbach shows how these technologies aim to quantify, track and regulate the body, while at the same time producing moments that bring the body’s affordances and relationship to the fore. This mediated experience of “health” may offer an alternative to biomedical definitions that define health against illness. To capture and analyze digital health experiences, Kressbach develops a method that combines descriptive practices from Film and Media Studies and Phenomenology. After examining the design and feedback structures of digital health platforms and devices, the author uses her own first-person accounts to analyze the impact of the technology on her body, behaviors, and perception of health. Across five chapters focused on different categories of digital health—menstrual trackers, sexual wellness technologies, fitness trackers, meditation and breathing technologies, and posture and running wearables—Sensing Health demonstrates a method of analysis that acknowledges and critiques the biomedical structures of digital health technology while remaining attentive to the lived experiences of users. Through a focus on the intersection of technological design and experience, this method can be used by researchers, scholars, designers, and developers alike.
Download or read book Hope and Uncertainty in Health and Medicine written by Bernhard Hadolt and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2024-05-31 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In health and medicine, imagining the future is essential in giving meaning to the past and the present and for propelling people into action. This is true not only at the level of individuals as they envision and carry out everyday activities and long-term plans but also for institutional practices framed by and unfolding within various socio-political ecologies and transfigurations. Hope and uncertainty are critical affective and knowledge-related modalities of such imaginations and assume vital meanings in policing, managing, and experiencing health, illness, and well-being. This volume brings together contributions from medical anthropologists who address this theme across various medical spheres, including the pragmatics of hope and uncertainty, the techno-sphere, health management, and individual and socially distributed emotions.
Download or read book Digital Anthropology written by Haidy Geismar and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-05-26 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Digital Anthropology, 2nd Edition explores how human and digital can be explored in relation to one another within issues as diverse as social media use, virtual worlds, hacking, quantified self, blockchain, digital environmentalism and digital representation. The book challenges the prevailing moral universal of “the digital age” by exploring emergent anxieties about the global spread of new technological forms, the cultural qualities of digital experience, critically examining the intersection of the digital to new concepts and practices across a wide range of fields from design to politics. In this fully revised edition, Digital Anthropology reveals how the intense scrutiny of ethnography can overturn assumptions about the impact of digital culture and reveal its profound consequences for everyday life around the world. Combining case studies with theoretical discussion in an engaging style that conveys a passion for new frontiers of enquiry within anthropological study, this will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in theory of anthropology, media and information studies, communication studies and sociology. With a brand-new Introduction from editors Haidy Geismar and Hannah Knox, as well as an abridged version of the original Introduction by Heather Horst and Daniel Miller, in conjunction with new chapters on hacking and digitizing environments, amongst others, and fully revised chapters throughout, this will bring the field-defining overview of digital anthropology fully up to date.
Download or read book Data Paradoxes written by Klaus Hoeyer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2023-04-18 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Why healthcare cannot—and should not—become data-driven, despite the many promises of intensified data sourcing. In contemporary healthcare, everybody seems to want more data, of higher quality, on more people, and to use this data for a wider range of purposes. In theory, such pervasive data collection should lead to a healthcare system in which data can quickly, efficiently, and unambiguously be interpreted and provide better care for patients, more efficient administration, enhanced options for research, and accelerated economic growth. In practice, however, data are difficult to interpret and the many purposes often undermine one another. In this book, anthropologist and STS scholar Klaus Hoeyer offers an in-depth look at the paradoxes surrounding healthcare data. Focusing on Denmark, a world leader in healthcare data infrastructures, Hoeyer shares the perspectives of different stakeholders, from epidemiologists to hospital managers, from patients to physicians, analyzing the social dynamics set in motion by data intensification and calling special attention to that which cannot be easily coded in a database. HHe illustrates how data can be at once helpful, overwhelming, and sometimes disastrous through concrete examples. The COVID-19 pandemic serves as a special closing case study that shows how these data paradoxes carry weighty political implications. By revealing the diverse and sometimes contradictory practices spawned by intensified data sourcing, Data Paradoxes raises vital questions about how we might better use healthcare data.
Download or read book Navigating Digital Health Landscapes written by Anna Lydia Svalastog and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Navigating Digital Health Landscapes explores how users navigate the internet when searching for health information. It is the first book to conceptualise the internet as a landscape and the ways in which people navigate this digital world, including the complex entanglements between on and offline domains. It does so through a range of disciplinary perspectives from expert contributors across STS (science and technology studies), social anthropology, biomedicine, ethics and law, linguistics, social policy and computer scientists working in more technical aspects of tracking and visualising data and information on the internet. The book provides a unique and valuable contribution for those wishing to understand how digital technologies are affecting the design, implementation and use of digital systems to manage health information in different contexts.
Download or read book Resilient Cyborgs written by Nelly Oudshoorn and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-04-02 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how pacemakers and defibrillators participate in transforming life and death in high-tech societies. In both popular and medical accounts, these internal devices are often portrayed as almost magical technologies. Once implanted in bodies, they do not require any ‘user’ agency. In this unique and timely book, Nelly Oudshoorn argues that any discourse or policy assuming a passive role for people living with these implants silences the fact that keeping cyborg bodies alive involves their active engagement. Pacemakers and defibrillators not only act as potentially life-saving technologies, but simultaneously transform the fragility of bodies by introducing new vulnerabilities. Oudshoorn offers a fascinating examination of what it takes to become a resilient cyborg, and in the process develops a valuable new sociology of creating ‘resilient’ cyborgs.
Download or read book From Measuring Rods to DNA Sequencing written by Ingrid Voléry and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-05 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book provides a solid basis to understand two centuries of bodily measurement practices and their scientific and political scope throughout the Western world. By exploring various cases, it proposes a new approach of measurement from an epistemological point of view and demonstrates the central role of the measurement of the body for political purposes. By studying categorizations of race, age and quality of life between the 19th and 20th century, the first part of the book highlights how human body measurements extend from the flesh to subjective experience. The second part shows how genomic correction and life support technologies reshape the frontiers between things, humans and social subjects. The final part reveals how contemporary measurements of age, race and disease gave rise to new hierarchies between human beings and social groups. The book concludes by considering different styles of measuring the body and their ontological consequences.
Download or read book Health Apps Genetic Diets and Superfoods written by Tina Sikka and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-02-23 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book critically examines contemporary health and wellness culture through the lens of personalization, genetification and functional foods. These developments have had a significant impact on the intersecting categories of gender, race, and class in light of the increasing adoption of digital health and surveillance technologies like MyFitnessPal, Lifesum, HealthyifyMe, and Fooducate. These three vectors of identity, when analysed in relation to food, diet, health, and technology, reveal significant new ways in which inequality, hierarchy, and injustice become manifest. In the book, Tina Sikka argues that the corporate-led trends associated with health apps, genetic testing, superfoods, and functional foods have produced a kind of dietary-genomic-functional food industrial complex. She makes the positive case for a prosocial, food secure, and biodiverse health and food culture that is rooted in community action, supported by strong public provisioning of health care, and grounded in principles of food justice and sovereignty.
Download or read book Human Enactment Of Intelligent Technologies Towards Metis And Mindfulness written by W David Holford and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2021-08-05 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book demystifies what artificial intelligence is, examines its strength and limitations in comparison to what humans are capable of, and investigates the nature of human adaptive expertise across the concept of mètis. It also examines a particular family of mindsets that we as humans have adopted over the ages, namely epistemologies of representational knowledge. These representational perspectives have followed us into numerous fields, including how we perceive and comprehend human cognition — leading to 'with a hammer everything looks like a nail' syndrome. As such, this book presents the alternative phenomenological viewpoint of embodied direct reality within the cognitive sciences in the form of radical embodied cognition and, more importantly, how it allows us to better highlight and comprehend human mètis and its adaptive expertise. We then examine why we collectively continue to enact and perpetuate predominant mindsets of representations across the phenomena of mindlessness. To counter this, we re-visit the practice of individual and collective mindfulness, providing a potential 'beachhead' in our re-appropriation of technology (artificial intelligence) towards achieving the best of both worlds — that is, allowing human creativity and ingenuity to be expressed with artificial intelligence as a tool to help us do just that across meaningful human control. Finally, we conclude by examining current top-of-the-horizon activities and debates regarding quantum physics in relation to the human mind and artificial intelligence and how, once again, representational mindsets need not be the only tool in town.
Download or read book Health Technology and Society written by Andrew Webster and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-07-06 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book celebrates and captures examples of the excellent scholarship that Palgrave’s Health, Technology, and Society Series has published since 2006, and reflects on how the field has developed over this time. As a collection of readings drawn from twenty-two books, it is organized around five themes: Innovation, Responsibility, Locus of Care, Knowledge Production, and Regulation and Governance. Structured in this way, the book gives the reader a concise but nonetheless rich guide to the core issues and debates within the field. Complementing these narratives, the original authors have provided new reflection pieces on their texts and on their current work. This then is a book which in part looks back but also looks forward to emerging issues at the intersection of health, technology, and society. It uniquely encompasses and presents a range of expertise in a novel way that is both timely and accessible for students and others new to the field.
Download or read book Vital and Health Statistics written by and published by . This book was released on 1979 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Public Health Personal Health and Pills written by Kevin Dew and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-07-24 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Public Health, Personal Health and Pills explores the processes and effects of the increasing governance of our lives through pharmaceuticals, looking at the moral, interactional, social and political forces that shape our use of them. It demonstrates the ways in which social relationships and identities are developed, sustained and transformed through medication use. Building on the extensive medicalisation of health literature, and the more recent concept of pharmaceuticalisation, this pioneering book is firmly based on empirical research and sociological theory. It brings together macro considerations of trends in pharmaceutical consumption, regulation and policy, micro considerations of the decision-making and the negotiation of medication use in homes and clinics, and an institutional analysis of the role of drug monitoring agencies, drug subsidising agencies, drug trial methodologies and the media. This book is a contribution to a burgeoning sociological interest in medication use, and will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars and students of sociology, science and technology studies, pharmacy and health studies.
Download or read book Ambient Assisted Living written by Reiner Wichert and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-11-22 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this book, leading authors in the field discuss development of Ambient Assisted Living. The contributions have been chosen and invited at the 6th AAL congress, Berlin. It presents new technological developments which support the autonomy and independence of individuals with special needs. As the technological innovation raises also social issues, the book addresses micro and macro economical aspects of assistive systems and puts an additional emphasis on the ethical and legal discussion. The presentation is supported by real world examples and applications.
Download or read book Humans and Devices in Medical Contexts written by Susanne Brucksch and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-06-19 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the ways in which socio-technical settings in medical contexts find varying articulations in a specific locale. Focusing on Japan, it consists of nine case studies on topics concerning: experiences with radiation in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima; patient security, end-of-life and high-tech medicine in hospitals; innovation and diffusion of medical technology; and the engineering and evaluating of novel devices in clinical trials. The individual chapters situate humans and devices in medical settings in their given semantic, pragmatic, institutional and historical context. A highly interdisciplinary approach offers deep insights beyond the manifold findings of each case study, thereby enriching academic discussions on socio-technical settings in medical contexts amongst affiliated disciplines. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars, practitioners, policy makers and students from various disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical humanities, social sciences, ethics and law, business and innovation studies, as well as biomedical engineering, medicine and public health.
Download or read book Reframing Algorithms written by Francesco Miele and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
