Digital technologies and the future of health: aspirations, care and data

Abstract

As projects seeking to provide digitized tools in health care and medicine are gaining ground at an accelerating pace, imaginations and incipient formations of digital health have acquired a new political urgency. These projects promise to revolutionize health care and medicine. However, efforts to institutionalize digital technologies in health are often fraught with difficulties that cause them to stall during implementation. We explore digital health technologies with respect to how they are aspired to, designed, used, and resisted. Our central argument is that the spread of digital health technologies has set in motion complex processes around the production, extraction, circulation, and economic valorization of data. These processes reconfigure multiple sets of relationships between people, between human bodies, and machines, and between actors in health care and the diverse institutional landscapes they inhabit. We explore these processes in three interrelated and geographically dispersed fields: (a) imaginaries of health and well-being; (b) new geographies of care; and (c) the datafication and (dis-)embodiment of health. This special issue brings into creative tension case studies from across geographical locations and thematic areas. Taken together, they draw attention to the question of how digital health technologies are situated in making and shaping the future of health care. By foregrounding anthropological perspectives, this Special Issue pushes the epistemological boundaries of the emerging scholarship on digital health technologies and global health. At the same time, it argues for a closer engagement of medical anthropologists and sociologists with processes of digitization in health.