| Start Date: | 12/3/2015 | Start Time: | 4:00 PM |
| End Date: | 12/3/2015 | End Time: | 5:00 PM |
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Event Description
Ali Kenner, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Politics, Center for Science, Technology and Society
Mobile health apps have emerged as a technological fix promising to improve asthma management. In the U.S., nonadherence to treatment is seen as the most pressing asthma risk; as such, emphasis has increasingly focused on getting asthmatics to take medications as prescribed. Mobile asthma apps aim to improve health literacy, enable users to better identify environmental and behavioral risks that trigger symptoms, routinize disease management and increase use of controller medicines, and make patient-provider communication more efficient. In doing so, mAsthma apps build on, extend, and refine existing disease management regimes through remediation. This paper looks at how mAsthma apps operate as part of “digital risk society,” where these personal health technologies create new modes of risk identification and management; promise to control messy and undisciplined subjects; use algorithms to generate new risk calculations; and make risk livelier through digital assemblages. Drawing on content and design analysis of mAsthma apps, as well as interviews with app developers, this paper suggests that these digital care technologies emplace disease and risk in ways that largely reinforce biomedical paradigms, but also offer insight into place-based dynamics that are deprioritized in clinical treatment and research. Nevertheless, even when place-based valences emerge through mAsthma apps, they seem unable to go beyond a strict neoliberalized patient responsibility. |
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Location:
PSA Library, 3234 Powelton Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104 |
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