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.

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.

Public Health, Personal Health and Pills explores the processes and effects of the increasing governance of our lives through pharmaceuticals, looking at the moral, interactional, social and political forces that shape our use of them. It demonstrates the ways in which social relationships and identities are developed, sustained and transformed through medication use. Building on the extensive medicalisation of health literature, and the more recent concept of pharmaceuticalisation, this pioneering book is firmly based on empirical research and sociological theory. It brings together macro considerations of trends in pharmaceutical consumption, regulation and policy, micro considerations of the decision-making and the negotiation of medication use in homes and clinics, and an institutional analysis of the role of drug monitoring agencies, drug subsidising agencies, drug trial methodologies and the media. This book is a contribution to a burgeoning sociological interest in medication use, and will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars and students of sociology, science and technology studies, pharmacy and health studies.

In health and medicine, imagining the future is essential in giving meaning to the past and the present and for propelling people into action. This is true not only at the level of individuals as they envision and carry out everyday activities and long-term plans but also for institutional practices framed by and unfolding within various socio-political ecologies and transfigurations. Hope and uncertainty are critical affective and knowledge-related modalities of such imaginations and assume vital meanings in policing, managing, and experiencing health, illness, and well-being. This volume brings together contributions from medical anthropologists who address this theme across various medical spheres, including the pragmatics of hope and uncertainty, the techno-sphere, health management, and individual and socially distributed emotions.

In this book, leading authors in the field discuss development of Ambient Assisted Living. The contributions have been chosen and invited at the 6th AAL congress, Berlin. It presents new technological developments which support the autonomy and independence of individuals with special needs. As the technological innovation raises also social issues, the book addresses micro and macro economical aspects of assistive systems and puts an additional emphasis on the ethical and legal discussion. The presentation is supported by real world examples and applications.

This book explores the ways in which socio-technical settings in medical contexts find varying articulations in a specific locale. Focusing on Japan, it consists of nine case studies on topics concerning: experiences with radiation in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima; patient security, end-of-life and high-tech medicine in hospitals; innovation and diffusion of medical technology; and the engineering and evaluating of novel devices in clinical trials. The individual chapters situate humans and devices in medical settings in their given semantic, pragmatic, institutional and historical context. A highly interdisciplinary approach offers deep insights beyond the manifold findings of each case study, thereby enriching academic discussions on socio-technical settings in medical contexts amongst affiliated disciplines. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars, practitioners, policy makers and students from various disciplines, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), medical humanities, social sciences, ethics and law, business and innovation studies, as well as biomedical engineering, medicine and public health.

This book demystifies what artificial intelligence is, examines its strength and limitations in comparison to what humans are capable of, and investigates the nature of human adaptive expertise across the concept of mètis. It also examines a particular family of mindsets that we as humans have adopted over the ages, namely epistemologies of representational knowledge. These representational perspectives have followed us into numerous fields, including how we perceive and comprehend human cognition — leading to 'with a hammer everything looks like a nail' syndrome. As such, this book presents the alternative phenomenological viewpoint of embodied direct reality within the cognitive sciences in the form of radical embodied cognition and, more importantly, how it allows us to better highlight and comprehend human mètis and its adaptive expertise. We then examine why we collectively continue to enact and perpetuate predominant mindsets of representations across the phenomena of mindlessness. To counter this, we re-visit the practice of individual and collective mindfulness, providing a potential 'beachhead' in our re-appropriation of technology (artificial intelligence) towards achieving the best of both worlds — that is, allowing human creativity and ingenuity to be expressed with artificial intelligence as a tool to help us do just that across meaningful human control. Finally, we conclude by examining current top-of-the-horizon activities and debates regarding quantum physics in relation to the human mind and artificial intelligence and how, once again, representational mindsets need not be the only tool in town.