Fair and equitable AI in biomedical research and healthcare: Social science perspectives.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers opportunities but also challenges for biomedical research and healthcare. This position paper shares the results of the international conference "Fair medicine and AI" (online 3-5 March 2021). Scholars from science and technology studies (STS), gender studies, and ethics of science and technology formulated opportunities, challenges, and research and development desiderata for AI in healthcare. AI systems and solutions, which are being rapidly developed and applied, may have undesirable and unintended consequences including the risk of perpetuating health inequalities for marginalized groups. Socially robust development and implications of AI in healthcare require urgent investigation. There is a particular dearth of studies in human-AI interaction and how this may best be configured to dependably deliver safe, effective and equitable healthcare. To address these challenges, we need to establish diverse and interdisciplinary teams equipped to develop and apply medical AI in a fair, accountable and transparent manner. We formulate the importance of including social science perspectives in the development of intersectionally beneficent and equitable AI for biomedical research and healthcare, in part by strengthening AI health evaluation.

The role of work in psychiatry: Historical reflections.

Until recently, the role of patient work in the history of psychiatry has been a neglected dimension. Yet, in the psychiatric institutions that emerged across the world from the late eighteenth century onwards, work and work therapy were prominent features, culminating in the rise of a specialist profession affiliated to medicine - occupational therapy. This article explores the changing meanings of work within varied medical, social, and political contexts.

Mouthsticks - A Participatory Approach.

Mouthsticks are quite an old kind of assistive technology (AT) but nevertheless they are up to now the Swiss army knives among AT. Unfortunately the popularity of mouthsticks massively decreased during the 1990s with the result that knowledge about how to produce good mouthsticks got lost and that there are hardly any adaptable mouthsticks available on the market. This paper discusses the development of a personalized mouthstick with the involvement of end users - people with severe physical disabilities - and occupational therapists as experts of everyday use. A participatory approach was chosen. The results of the analysis of a standardized questionnaire, group discussions and a collaborative workshop with IT-designers, polymer engineers, end users, occupational therapists and gender and diversity researchers are presented and discussed. This proved the necessity of the development of a personalized mouthstick.

Process Development for the Design and Manufacturing of Personalizable Mouth Sticks.

To increase the independence of people with reduced hand/arm functionality, a process to generate personalizable mouth sticks was developed based on the participatory design principle. In a web tool, anybody can choose the geometry and the materials of their mouth piece, stick and tip. Manufacturing techniques (e.g. 3D printing) and materials used in the process are discussed and evaluated.

Transnational psychiatries: social and cultural histories of psychiatry in comparative perspective c. 1800-2000

In a transnational research framework, this book presents case studies and original and historical conceptual reflections in a comparative methodology. It includes chapters of history and historiography of psychiatry and psychotherapy in different regions of South America, Asia, the Pacific and Europe emphasizing similarities and interconnections as well as contrasts and discontinuities

Crossing the boundaries of 'colonial psychiatry'. Reflections on the development of psychiatry in British India, C. 1870-1940.

This article explores the development of psychiatric institutions within the context of British colonial rule in India, in particular during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Existing scholarship on 'colonial medicine' has tended to focus on colonial power and hegemony and the British endeavour to 'colonize the Indian body' during the nineteenth century. It is suggested here that reference to 'colonial' medicine and psychiatry tends to reify the ideology of colonialism and neglect other important dimensions such as the role of international scientific networks and the mental hospital as the locus of care and medicalization. From the later period of British colonial engagement in south Asia, people's right and entitlement to medical care and the colonial state's obligation to provide institutional treatment facilities received increased attention. As the early twentieth-century case of an Indian hospital superintendent shows, practitioners' professional ambitions went beyond the confines of 'colonial psychiatry'. He practiced in his institution science-based psychiatry, drawing on models and treatment paradigms that were then prevalent in a variety of countries around the globe.

Colonial psychiatry, magic and religion. The case of mesmerism in British India.

This article is concerned with the development of early nineteenth-century Western medicine and psychiatry in relation to religion and magic during British colonial rule in India. The case of mesmerism is taken to illustrate that 'colonial medicine/psychiatry in India' itself was plural in nature, being made up of a variety of different, at times competing, strands. Religious connotations and references to spiritual enlightenment increasingly posed a peculiar problem to emerging Western science-based medicine in the nineteenth century. Mesmerism was met with as much hostility by an emerging Western medical orthodoxy as indigenous medical systems. The affiliation of mesmerism with Indian magical practices and religious customs contributed to its marginalization - despite or, rather, because of its popularity among members of the Indian nobility and middle classes, Indian patients and practitioners. The case of mesmerism also shows that awareness both of the domineering power of a gradually emerging medical 'imagined' mainstream and an analysis of the complex challenges faces by heterodoxy (as much as by orthodoxy) facilitate a more critical understanding of the development of colonial medicine and psychiatry in the East as well as, arguably, of medicine and psychiatry in Britain itself.