Citizens in Search for a Place in the Digital Health Data Space: A Case Study.

BACKGROUND: Digital health solutions have been omnipresent in policy agendas. However, we still need to better understand how citizens experience these developments and, more specifically, how citizens would ideally want such solutions to look like. OBJECTIVE: We explore the needs and concerns citizens expressed in different phases of the co-creation process for a prototype of a citizen-centred health data platform within a large-scale European project: Smart4Health. METHOD: We follow a qualitative approach in our analysis of 9 discussion groups in addition to a diverse set of 49 qualitative interviews with citizens and health care professionals. RESULTS: We show how citizens identify the positive potential of health data infrastructures and how they relate digital health to wider developments in contemporary societies. We then outline citizens' concerns that potentially prevent them from becoming users and thus destabilize the policy vision of digital health. CONCLUSION: Four preconditions need to be met for citizens to find their place within a digital health data environment: transparency/trust, infrastructural literacy, digital justice, and a careful consideration of the distribution of responsibilities.

Reordering the "World of Things": The Sociotechnical Imaginary of RFID Tagging and New Geographies of Responsibility.

The aim of this study is to investigate radio frequency identification (RFID) tagging as a form of sociotechnical experimentation and the kinds of sociotechnical futures at stake in this experimentation. For this purpose, a detailed analysis of a publicly available promotional video by a tag producer for the fashion industry, a sector widely using RFID tags, was analysed in detail. The results of the study indicated that the sociotechnical imaginary of RFID tagging gravitates around the core value of perfect sociotechnical efficiency. This demands a high degree of readiness to engage in standardization efforts, which performs a specific materialized understanding of ethics by other means. Furthermore, the analysis points to the importance of considering the spatiotemporal dimensions in which RFID tags work when reflecting on how this technology matters to society. Finally, the analysis shows a tacit effort to keep RFID technology and thus any questions of responsible innovation confined to the shop floor. However, given the spreading of the use of RFIDs, much wider-ranging considerations are called for.