Åpent forskningsseminar om "Digital Epidemiology" med Lukas Engelmann, University of Edinburgh

Interesserte ansatte og studenter inviteres til åpent forskningsseminar om Digital Epidemiologi med Lukas Engelmann fra University of Edinburgh

Employees and students are invited to an open reserch seminar on Digital Epidemiology with Lukas Engelmann from The University of Edinburgh

 

 

Digital Epidemiology promises the algorithmic analysis and digital visualisation of previously untapped data from social media, internet search terms or access-logs to conduct health surveillance. Overcoming conventional epidemiological measurements of health and disease, this new entrepreneurial epidemiology aims to overcome and disrupt the biased and slow moving reporting infrastructure of medical institutions. To achieve the proclaimed goals of increased accuracy, transparency and efficiency for real-time surveillance, the production, gathering and structuring of health-data is purposefully placed outside of the traditional institutions of health surveillance. Instead, models, concepts and systems to syphon non-medical data for information about health are usually to be found in independent research labs, start-up incubators or the digital industry.

In this field, one concept has found particular proliferation in recent projects and will be the focus of this talk: the digital phenotype. The concept, which is borrowed from Dawkin’s ‘extended phenotype’ implies the human body as one that has genuinely extended into a digital life. With the aim to cover the entirety of digital traces of an individual, produced both voluntarily and involuntarily, biologically and socially, the digital phenotype shifts the focus to online-interactions as valuable diagnostic and prognostic resources. It offers the integration of a wide range of previously opaque information, promising to uncover the “source code of nurture” and to grasp the social determinants of disease at scale (Abnousi et al 2018). Where traditional health surveillance is organised around the gold-standard of case reports, ultimately bound to a diagnosis carried out by a trained medical professional or the laboratory, the digital phenotype encourages a system in which non-medical data is syphoned, analysed, structured and repurposed into health-data. My talk will offer a thorough consideration of the ethical implications of the digital phenotype. As our ‘inconspicuous’ online-data enables a vastly growing research landscape without the ethical boundaries of medical research, surely its users (which are also the origin of the system’s product) should benefit from their contribution to scientific knowledge.

Biographical note:

Lukas Engelmann is a Chancellor’s Fellow at Science, Technology and Innovations Studies (STIS) at the University of Edinburgh. He has a background in medical history and works at the intersection of the history and sociology of biomedicine. Engelmann’s current research aims to bring the history of epidemiology to bear on its digital present, and relies on a combination of fieldwork and archival research. He has recently published his first book with Cambridge University Press, Mapping AIDS.

Når: 12.03.19 kl 12.15–14.00
Hvor: MH2: U.09.308 UIT Tromsø
Sted: Tromsø
Målgruppe: Ansatte, Studenter
Ansvarlig: Marthe Schille-Rognmo
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