03/12/21 - Ethical Implications of Digital Health
03/12/21 12:00pm - 1:00pm
This session addresses some ethical issues that occur when engaging with digital health products. The concept of digital health is vast and rapidly changing, exposing how different processes across commercial, medical and recreational sectors engage with consumer health data. Along with the development of these technologies there has been a shift in how health and medical interventions are conceptualized, diagnosed and interpreted. Specifically, the emergence of self-testing and self-reporting biometrics has accelerated the datafication of health as a commodity. What has emerged from these processes is a blurring between consumer and data, where health analytics take on a life of their own as they are transferred to cloud storage, become composited, and then repackaged and sold in bundles to divergent markets. This has been brought on by the availability of software capable of handling vast amounts of data and interpret trends and behavior across all aspects of social life. Data ownership, crowdsourcing and privacy issues are among some of the most pressing concerns affecting digital health developments. In this seminar, I argue for a revision of guidelines on the use of health technologies, ownership of medical information, privacy settings, and patient consent.