THE HEALTH INTERNET OF THINGS

The speed and volume at which technologies grow and subtly penetrate physical human life ask for discursive, ethnographic and qualitative research in the digital healthcare sector.

From mobile health platforms (mHealth) to the Health Internet of Things (HIoT)

Since the early 2000s, mobile health platforms have influenced the healthcare sector like no other technology and led to various disputes ranging from privacy concerns (van Dijk & Poell, 2016) to more macro-level issues such as the commodification of this admittedly very personal area of life (Istepanian, 2022). The synergy between digital media and health is relatively new and often subject to inadequate data protection through legislation (van Dijk & Poell, 2016). The dynamics of mobile health platforms have been extensively investigated through multiple scientific lens (van Dijk & Poell, 2016). Recently, in relation to gender and sexuality (Bell et al., 2022) as applications deploy seductive lexical weaponry like “open” to incentivise customers to sign up (van Dijk & Poell, 2016). The issue at hand is that data streams are combined and made available to opaque parties which creates an “asymmetric relationship between those who collect, store, and mine large quantities of data, and those whom data collection targets” (Andrejevic, 2014, p. 1673). However, scholars have argued that the digitisation of the healthcare industry is only in an initial state (Celi et al., 2016) and that more disruptive developments are happening external to schooled medical experts and are rather monetarily motivated — such as fitness apps (Celi et al., 2016; Istepanian, 2022). This sector and academic body of literature is constantly incrementing in volume and velocity. There are ethical, managerial and scientific interests involved in the use of technologies such as the internet of things, predictive medical sensors or body cameras that epitomise the the cyber-physical space this sector is navigating nowadays (Benis, 2022; Dridi, Sassi & Faiz, 2017; Habibzadeh et al., 2019; Manogaran et al., 2017).

Looking ahead

This is expected to grow even further, interfacing with technologies such as artificial intelligence, blockchain or human-machine interaction (robotics). Curiously, this highly important and dynamic topic seems to be located outside of the area of interest for qualitative or ethnographic research, with only a few exceptions in the recent years (Knop, Mueller & Niehaves, 2021; Shin, 2017; Vo, Auroy & Sarradon-Eck, 2019). The majority of papers seems to be concerned with mobile health apps (Vo, Auroy & Sarradon-Eck, 2019), while a new disruptive technology has long taken over: healthcare internet of things. There is excruciating need to investigate its nexus with metaphysical aspects of how humans navigate this cyber-physical space and make meaning of and within it because the rapid developments in the health sector will soon be capitalised on and transferred to other, normal areas of human life.

It is therefore crucial that researchers and (digital) health professionals investigate possibilities and consequences of the Health Internet of Things and concerns of interaction as well as metaphysical and ethical aspects of how humans navigate and integrate such cyber — physical spaces in their daily lives.

© Luka Paul Vethake, 2024