Mirror, Mirror on the Wall, Who’s the Healthiest One of All?
Posted by Emily Beitiks November 16, 2011
Biopolitical Times
An op-ed in last week’s New York Times, “Our High-Tech Health-Care
Future,” would surely make George Orwell cringe. Orwell forecast a world
in which a Big Brother state uses technology to regulate and police a
subservient population. Author Frank Moss celebrates the prospect of
technological self-policing, with claims that it will be good for
society.
Moss wants to prioritize the development of high-tech health gadgets that consumers would use at home to monitor and assess their health outside the doctor’s office. Your bathroom mirror might measure your health stats each morning, an iPhone app might diagnose your symptoms and report them to your doctor, or wireless sensors attached to your body might track your behavior to assess your diet and exercise. Moss argues that all of us should welcome these devices into our lives, so that “consumer health” can fix the problems of U.S. health-care and the economy.
Call me a skeptic.
Two years ago, I sat through a presentation on devices similar to those that Moss promotes. Most of the attendees were representatives from large corporate R&D departments; on one side of me sat someone from General Mills and on the other, an employee from Amway. One highlighted product “in the works” was an arm patch to count your calorie intake throughout the day, and send this data to your social networking feed. The presenter remarked that a late-night piece of cake could prompt reminders the next morning from your Facebook friends to “reach for a carrot next time!”
After the presentation, we were broken up into groups to share our reactions, and I was astounded by the enthusiasm for this device. Perhaps because I do not stand to make a profit off such devices, my gut reaction was deep concern. The others saw these devices as enabling self-empowerment. To me, they look like yet another means for policing, surveying, and regulating.
Sure, neither Moss nor the presenter of the arm patch was advocating mandatory use and compliance. And Moss calls for a Congressional bill to extend privacy assurances to such devices. But with the rise in identity fraud, would you feel confident that your insurance company would be unable to use the information against you? (Sorry, that 12 a.m. piece of cake just raised your premium.) The recent news that Visa wants access to their clients’ DNA to improve their marketing efforts is one indication that new forms and quantities of biomedical data might not be completely benign.
Merrill Goozner of Gooznews raises other concerns in response to Moss’s piece. He asks:
Moss wants to prioritize the development of high-tech health gadgets that consumers would use at home to monitor and assess their health outside the doctor’s office. Your bathroom mirror might measure your health stats each morning, an iPhone app might diagnose your symptoms and report them to your doctor, or wireless sensors attached to your body might track your behavior to assess your diet and exercise. Moss argues that all of us should welcome these devices into our lives, so that “consumer health” can fix the problems of U.S. health-care and the economy.
Call me a skeptic.
Two years ago, I sat through a presentation on devices similar to those that Moss promotes. Most of the attendees were representatives from large corporate R&D departments; on one side of me sat someone from General Mills and on the other, an employee from Amway. One highlighted product “in the works” was an arm patch to count your calorie intake throughout the day, and send this data to your social networking feed. The presenter remarked that a late-night piece of cake could prompt reminders the next morning from your Facebook friends to “reach for a carrot next time!”
After the presentation, we were broken up into groups to share our reactions, and I was astounded by the enthusiasm for this device. Perhaps because I do not stand to make a profit off such devices, my gut reaction was deep concern. The others saw these devices as enabling self-empowerment. To me, they look like yet another means for policing, surveying, and regulating.
Sure, neither Moss nor the presenter of the arm patch was advocating mandatory use and compliance. And Moss calls for a Congressional bill to extend privacy assurances to such devices. But with the rise in identity fraud, would you feel confident that your insurance company would be unable to use the information against you? (Sorry, that 12 a.m. piece of cake just raised your premium.) The recent news that Visa wants access to their clients’ DNA to improve their marketing efforts is one indication that new forms and quantities of biomedical data might not be completely benign.
Merrill Goozner of Gooznews raises other concerns in response to Moss’s piece. He asks:
Have
the visionaries behind this high-tech medical future considered what
will happen when Chinese and Russian cyberspace warriors hack into the
system and send messages to the home computers of 100 million Americans
that their blood pressure is out of control? That alone could cause an
additional 10,000 heart attacks.
What is particularly troubling about Moss’s perspective
is his suggestion that these high-tech devices can fix our health-care
system. With so many of our health-care problems attributable to the
rise of the consumerist model (1,2), it seems unlikely that more consumer
products would be key to making significant change - even if they were
available to everyone. Moss acknowledges that his goal is far-fetched
but believes that "the burgeoning consumer health revolution has a
powerful force on its side - American creativity."
I'd rather see our creativity put to another use: looking for something better than a techno-fix to our health-care woes.
Previously on Biopolitical Times:
- Visa Wants to Make Money off Your DNA
- Next Generation Identification - Not a DNA Database, but Just as Problematic