Digitised Health, Medicine and Risk

A prevailing excitement can be discerned in the medical and public health literature and popular media concerning the apparent 'disruptive' or 'revolutionary' potential of digital health technologies. Most of the wider social implications are often ignored or glossed over in such accounts. Critical approaches from within the social sciences that take a more measured perspective are important - including those that focus on risk. The contributors to this volume examine various dimensions of risk in the context of digital health. They identify that digital health devices and software offer the ability to configure new forms of risk, in concert with novel responsibilities. The contributions emphasise the sheer volume of detail about very personal and private elements of people's lives, emotions and bodies that contemporary digital technologies can collect. They show that apps and other internet tools and forums provide opportunities for health and medical risks to be identified, publicised or managed, but also for unvalidated new therapies to be championed. Most of the authors identify the neoliberal 'soft' politics of digital health, in which lay people are encouraged ('nudged') to engage in practices of identifying and managing health risk in their own interests, and the victim-blaming that may be part of these discourses. This book was originally published as a special issue of Health, Risk and Society.

Deborah Lupton is Centenary Research Professor in the News & Media Research Centre, Faculty of Arts & Design, University of Canberra, Australia. Her research spans sociology and media and cultural studies. She is the author/co-author of 15 books and three edited volumes.

Introduction: Digitised health, medicine and risk Deborah Lupton Risk in the design and development of apps 2. The gamification of risk: how health apps foster self-confidence and why this is not enough 3. Threats and thrills: pregnancy apps, risk and consumption 4. Asthma on the move: how mobile apps remediate risk for disease management 5. Digital 'solutions' to unhealthy lifestyle 'problems': the construction of social and personal risks in the development of eCoaches Individual users and the construction of risk 6. Digitalised health, risk and motherhood: politics of infant feeding in post-colonial Hong Kong 7. 'Holy shit, didn't realise my drinking was high risk': an analysis of the way risk is enacted through an online alcohol and drug screening intervention 8. Stem cell miracles or Russian roulette?: patients' use of digital media to campaign for access to clinically unproven treatments Citizens' understanding of the impact of digital technology on risk 9. Biosensing: how citizens' views illuminate emerging health and social risks