Patient data as medical facts: social media practices as a foundation for medical knowledge creation

This paper investigates a web-based, medical research network that relies on patient self-reporting to collect and analyze data on the health status of patients, mostly suffering from severe conditions. The network organizes patient participation in ways that break with the strong expert culture of medical research. Patient data entry is largely unsupervised. It relies on a data architecture that encodes medical knowledge and medical categories, yet remains open to capturing details of patient life that have as a rule remained outside the purview of medical research. The network thus casts the pursuit of medical knowledge in a web-based context, marked by the pivotal importance of patient experience captured in the form of patient data. The originality of the network owes much to the innovative amalgamation of networking and computational functionalities built into a potent social media platform. The arrangements the network epitomizes could be seen as a harbinger of new models of organizing medical knowledge creation and medical work in the digital age, and a complement or alternative to established models of medical research

School use of learning platforms and associated technologies

Study of benefits and effective use of learning platforms in schools based on 12 case studie

CREATe 2012-2016: Impact on society, industry and policy through research excellence and knowledge exchange

On the eve of the CREATe Festival May 2016, the Centre published this legacy report (edited by Kerry Patterson & Sukhpreet Singh with contributions from consortium researchers)

Mobile, wearable and ingestible health technologies : towards a critical research agenda

In this article, we review critical research on mobile and wearable health technologies focused on the promotion of ‘healthy lifestyles’. We begin by discussing key governmental and policy interests which indicate a shift towards greater digital integration in health care. Subsequently, we review relevant research literature, which highlights concerns about inclusion, social justice, and ownership of mobile health data, which we argue, provoke a series of key sociological questions that are in need of additional investigation. We examine the expansion of what counts as health data, as a basis for advocating the need for greater research into this area. Finally, we consider how digital devices raise questions about the reconfiguration of relationships, behaviours, and concepts of individuality

Wearable computing: Will it make people prosocial?

We recently reported that people who wear an eye tracker modify their natural looking behaviour in a prosocial manner. This change in looking behaviour represents a potential concern for researchers who wish to use eye trackers to understand the functioning of human attention. On the other hand, it may offer a real boon to manufacturers and consumers of wearable computing (e.g., Google Glass), for if wearable computing causes people to behave in a prosocial manner, then the public's fear that people with wearable computing will invade their privacy is unfounded. Critically, both of these divergent implications are grounded on the assumption that the prosocial behavioural effect of wearing an eye tracker is sustained for a prolonged period of time. Our study reveals that on the very first wearing of an eye tracker, and in less than 10 min, the prosocial effect of an eye tracker is abolished, but by drawing attention back to the eye tracker, the implied presence effect is easily reactivated. This suggests that eye trackers induce a transient social presence effect, which is rendered dormant when attention is shifted away from the source of implied presence. This is good news for researchers who use eye trackers to measure attention and behaviour; and could be bad news for advocates of wearable computing in everyday life

A quantified past : fieldwork and design for remembering a data-driven life

PhD ThesisA ‘data-driven life’ has become an established feature of present and future technological visions. Smart homes, smart cities, an Internet of Things, and particularly the Quantified Self movement are all premised on the pervasive datafication of many aspects of everyday life. This thesis interrogates the human experience of such a data-driven life, by conceptualising, investigating, and speculating about these personal informatics tools as new technologies of memory. With respect to existing discourses in Human-Computer Interaction, Memory Studies and Critical Data Studies, I argue that the prevalence of quantified data and metrics is creating fundamentally new and distinct records of everyday life: a quantified past. To address this, I first conduct qualitative, and idiographic fieldwork – with long-term self-trackers, and subsequently with users of ‘smart journals’ – to investigate how this data-driven record mediates the experience of remembering. Further, I undertake a speculative and design-led inquiry to explore context of a ’quantified wedding’. Adopting a context where remembering is centrally valued, this Research through Design project demonstrates opportunities and develops considerations for the design of data-driven tools for remembering. Crucially, while speculative, this project maintains a central focus on individual experience, and introduces an innovative methodological approach ‘Speculative Enactments’ for engaging participants meaningfully in speculative inquiry. The outcomes of this conceptual, empirical and speculative inquiry are multiple. I present, and interpret, a variety of rich descriptions of existing and anticipated practices of remembering with data. Introducing six experiential qualities of data, and reflecting on how data requires selectivity and construction to meaningfully account for one’s life, I argue for the design of ‘Documentary Informatics’. This perspective fundamentally reimagines the roles and possibilities for personal informatics tools; it looks beyond the current present-focused and goal-oriented paradigm of a data-driven life, to propose a more poetic orientation to recording one’s life with quantified data

Subjectivities in motion: Dichotomies in consumer engagements with self-tracking technologies

With the rise of self-tracking technologies (STT), self-quantification has become a popular digital consumption phenomenon. Despite recent academic interests, self-tracking practices remain poorly understood, in particular, little is known on how consumers engage with STT and how such behavioural trends produce new subjectivities. This paper adopts a Foucauldian perspective of self-surveillance to explore: how do subjectivities emerge from consumer interactions and engagements with self-tracking technologies? Data were collected from twenty participants using an ethnographic research design over six months consisting of semi-structured interviews and participant observation. The findings reveal two sets of dichotomies in the way consumers engage with STT, categorised as: ‘health and indulgence’ and ‘labour and leisure’. Through these dichotomies of self-surveillance, four subjectivities emerged: ‘redemptive self’, ‘awardee’, ‘loyal’ and ‘innovator’. Our study presents subjectivities as a continual process of (re)configuration of the self, as consumers move from one dichotomy to another. At the practical level, our findings offer novel approaches to segment consumers by reviewing the different contours of consumer behaviour in their interactions with STT

Individual and collective identification in contemporary forensics

It has long been understood that individual and collective identification are inexorably intertwined. This convergence is not limited to genetics. This paper discusses the convergence of individual and collective identification in a comparative analysis of three other forensic areas: fingerprint analysis, microscopic hair comparison, and microbiome forensics. In all three case studies, we see purportedly individualizing technologies reverting, in a sense, to collective identification. Presumably, this has much to do with the perceived utility of collective identification. When knowing precisely who is the donor of a trace is not possible, or not useful, then knowing that the donor is ‘white,’ or ‘black,’ or ‘Middle Eastern’ begins to seem somehow useful. In each case, we also see that these collective identifications are ultimately founded on crude and broad, seemingly ‘commonsensical’ or ‘social,’ racial categories. These categories, meanwhile, are based on a less-than-fully-transparent combination of self-identification or official ascription. These suspect data are then transformed into seemingly persuasive scientific claims about the genetic attributes of this or that ‘race,’ ‘ethnicity,’ or ‘ancestry.’ Through this comparison the paper will explore how the individual and the collective are ‘done’ differently and similarly in different forensic disciplines