Overview
- Presents expert work that brings together previously separated aspects of health and technology experiences by examining the new concept of the personal medical device
- Provides readers with a comprehensive introduction to this emerging field of research
- Takes a broad approach to overcome gaps between areas of academic research by focusing on both medical and wellness objectives
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Health, Technology and Society (HTE)
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Table of contents (12 chapters)
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Introduction
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Reconstructing the Personal: Bodies, Selves and PMDs
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Reconstructing the Medical: Data, Ethics, Discourse and PMDs
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Reconstructing the Device: Regulation, Commercialisation, and Design
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Conclusion
Keywords
About this book
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.
Reviews
“This exciting and timely book provides dearly needed insights into how people try to make sense of ways to quantify their bodies, and how their data ‘act back’ on them. Through thorough case studies the reader glimpses how personal medical devices tell people different things about who they are and should be, and how these intimate data travel in wider networks of medicine, commericialisation, regulation and design.” (Jeannette Pols, Socrates professor ‘Social Theory, Humanism and Materialities’, Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam / section of Medical Ethics, Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam)
Editors and Affiliations
About the editors
Dr Conor Farrington is a Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, UK.
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Quantified Lives and Vital Data
Book Subtitle: Exploring Health and Technology through Personal Medical Devices
Editors: Rebecca Lynch, Conor Farrington
Series Title: Health, Technology and Society
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95235-9
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan London
eBook Packages: Social Sciences, Social Sciences (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95234-2Published: 18 October 2017
Softcover ISBN: 978-1-349-95769-9Published: 18 May 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-1-349-95235-9Published: 05 October 2017
Series ISSN: 2946-3386
Series E-ISSN: 2946-3378
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XXI, 298
Number of Illustrations: 3 b/w illustrations, 2 illustrations in colour
Topics: Medical Sociology, Health Promotion and Disease Prevention, Health Informatics, Science and Technology Studies