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.
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"Personal medical devices have moved out of the clinic and into the home, the street and the workplace. They are used not only by the ill, but also by the well. As yet, however, we know little about how and why people take up the devices: what they love and hate about them, how they incorporate the devices into their everyday lives and how they make sense of and negotiate the floods of information the devices generate. This marvellous collection goes a long way towards developing detailed sociocultural analyses of personal medical devices across a diverse range of contexts." (Professor Deborah Lupton, Centenary Research Professor, News & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra, Australia) "This exciting and timely book provides dearly needed insights into how people try to make sense of ways to quantify their bodies, and how their data 'act back' on them. Through thorough case studies the reader glimpses how personal medical devices tell people different things about who they are and should be, and how these intimate data travel in wider networks of medicine, commericialisation, regulation and design." (Jeannette Pols, Socrates professor 'Social Theory, Humanism and Materialities', Department of Anthropology, University of Amsterdam / section of Medical Ethics, Academic Medical Centre in Amsterdam)
Dr Rebecca Lynch is a Research Fellow in Medical Anthropology at London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, UK. Dr Conor Farrington is a Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, UK.
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