Augmenting Workplace Wellness Programs with Biometric Monitoring

This annotated bibliography contains recent research describing the practices, policies, risks, and results regarding employer-sponsored wellness programs in the United States that are increasingly augmented with biometric monitoring features such as fitness trackers. The goal of this study is to improve the understanding of common risks and shortcomings so that individuals designing or augmenting wellness programs have improved chances of achieving success in helping employees reach positive health outcomes

The datafication of health

Over the past decade, data-intensive logics and practices have come to affect domains of contemporary life ranging from marketing and policy making to entertainment and education; at every turn, there is evidence of “datafication” or the conversion of qualitative aspects of life into quantified data. The datafication of health unfolds on a number of different scales and registers, including data-driven medical research and public health infrastructures, clinical health care, and self-care practices. For the purposes of this review, we focus mainly on the latter two domains, examining how scholars in anthropology, sociology, science and technology studies, and media and communication studies have begun to explore the datafication of clinical and self-care practices. We identify the dominant themes and questions, methodological approaches, and analytical resources of this emerging literature, parsing these under three headings: datafied power, living with data, and data–human mediations. We conclude by urging scholars to pay closer attention to how datafication is unfolding on the “other side” of various digital divides (e.g., financial, technological, geographic), to experiment with applied forms of research and data activism, and to probe links to areas of datafication that are not explicitly related to health.Peer reviewe

A Unified Health Information System Framework for Connecting Data, People, Devices, and Systems

The COVID-19 pandemic has heightened the necessity for pervasive data and system interoperability to manage healthcare information and knowledge. There is an urgent need to better understand the role of interoperability in improving the societal responses to the pandemic. This paper explores data and system interoperability, a very specific area that could contribute to fighting COVID-19. Specifically, the authors propose a unified health information system framework to connect data, systems, and devices to increase interoperability and manage healthcare information and knowledge. A blockchain-based solution is also provided as a recommendation for improving the data and system interoperability in healthcare

The ethics of uncertainty for data subjects

Modern health data practices come with many practical uncertainties. In this paper, I argue that data subjects’ trust in the institutions and organizations that control their data, and their ability to know their own moral obligations in relation to their data, are undermined by significant uncertainties regarding the what, how, and who of mass data collection and analysis. I conclude by considering how proposals for managing situations of high uncertainty might be applied to this problem. These emphasize increasing organizational flexibility, knowledge, and capacity, and reducing hazard