The Data Economy of Biosensors

Abstract

Biosensing does not take place in a void. It always has a social context of some kind, and that context has profound implications for the types of things that biosensors can and cannot do. The social context is, however, not as obvious as it might at first seem. There are some design considerations that must be tied to specific situations. For example, what one might build to enable professionals to care for an older person with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is very different from the monitor that tracks an athlete’s activity levels or what a citizen science group might use to look for better assessments of local air quality. What works well in fully privatized healthcare systems may not find much demand in single-payer systems. Even within single-payer systems, what works in the Netherlands may not work well in the United Kingdom. There are also differences that need attending to, based on not just the population of end users but on a whole range of other actors involved. The way we represent data to professionals must be very different from the way it is represented to epidemiologists or civil society groups.