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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.
List of contents
Preface.- 1. Personal medical devices: People and technology in the context of health; Conor Farrington and Rebecca Lynch.- 2. Theorising personal medical devices;Steve Matthewman.- Part 1: Reconstructing the personal: Bodies, selves and PMDs.- 3. Biosensing networks: Sense making in consumer genomics and ovulation tracking; Mette Kragh-Furbo, Joann Wilkinson, Maggie Mort, Celia Roberts, and Adrian Mackenzie.- 4. In/Visible personal medical devices: Insulin pumps as visual and material mediators between selves and others; Ava Hess.- 5. Redrawing boundaries around the self and the body: The case of self-quantifying technologies;Farzana Dudhwala.- Part 2: Reconstructing the medical: Data, ethics, discourse and PMDs.- 6. Data as transformational: Constrained and liberated bodies in an 'artificial pancreas' study; Conor Farrington.- 7. PMDs and the moral specialness of medicine: An analysis of the 'keepsake ultrasound'; Anna Smajdor and Andrea Stockl.- 8. Slippery slopes and Trojan horses: The construction of e-cigarettes as risky objects in public health debate; Rebecca Lynch.- Part 3: Reconstructing the device: Regulation, commercialisation, and design.- 9. Blood informatics: Negotiating the regulation and usership of personal devices for medical care and recreational self-monitoring; Alex Faulkner.- 10. Commercialising bodies: Action, subjectivity and the new corporate health ethic;Chris Till.- 11. Co-designing for care: Craft and wearable wellbeing Anthony Kent and Peta Bush.- 12. Quantified lives and vital data: Concluding remarks;Conor Farrington and Rebecca Lynch.
About the author
Dr Rebecca Lynch is a Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK.
Dr Conor Farrington is a Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, UK.
Summary
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.
