Technologies of Care
14.45-15.45 November 5, Session 1
Room: 22-1017
This session explores how medical technologies present, mediate, and reshape health knowledge and care, from data‑driven clinical interactions to AI systems and life‑sustaining devices in the home.
Siddhart Nair | Health AI: Disappearing patients and absent bodies? |
Daniel Skog | Navigating Digital Data: Multimodal Interaction and Health Literacy in Pediatric Diabetes Care |
Ellinor Rydhamn Ledin | Taming the pediatric long-term tracheostomy- caring for and living with technology-dependent children |
Abstracts
Health AI: Disappearing patients and absent bodies?
Siddhart Nair - Umeå University, Faculty of Social Sciences, Department of Informatics
Patient-centricity and mutualistic approaches, such as shared decision-making, were introduced to ensure patient participation in healthcare, particularly to manage longer term (chronic) conditions. With the introduction of new technological tools such as wearable devices, patients were further equipped as experts of their own self-generated data, as well as their lived experiences, and encouraged to self-manage their own chronic conditions, in partnership with clinicians. However, with the advent of AI, synthetic data and artificial patient panels seem to be becoming the norm, reiterating Leder’s words that “medicine has threatened to expunge its primary subject — the living, experiencing patient”. Bradby adds, “the human body has been reduced to sets of scanned images, lab results and relative risks as it figures less and less in the process of diagnosis and treatment”, and this is increasingly seen even when developing AI tools meant for patients. As Bradby continues, “the patient’s body is also gradually disappearing from day-to-day clinical work” and we extend this to examine how and why patients are being excluded from AI-making processes and practices in a health AI project (as a case study). Lastly, by avoiding extractive design routes, not leading to data collection through devices, or solely aiming to design better devices, how might patients be included as co-researchers, from critical feminist and STS perspectives? |
Navigating Digital Data: Multimodal Interaction and Health Literacy in Pediatric Diabetes Care
Daniel Skog - Uppsala University, Department of Scandinavian Languages
In my dissertation project, I frame health literacy as an interactional achievement, enacted through the complex interplay between social participants and technical artifacts. Drawing on video recordings analyzed through Conversation Analysis (CA), I explore routine consultations at a pediatric diabetes clinic involving teenagers (12–17), their guardians, and healthcare professionals. In this setting, medical technologies—such as insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitors—function as more than just tools; they act as active participants that shape the communicative landscape. The research focuses on how participants orient toward digital tools and medical data, using multimodal resources like gaze and gesture to translate clinical metrics into the practicalities of the patient’s unique everyday life. By examining knowledge claims in the presence of automated data, the analysis illustrates how medical understanding is collaboratively constructed in the moment. This approach moves beyond the boundary between clinical data and human experience, highlighting how health literacy is an embodied and cooperative process. The findings contribute to medical humanities by offering a nuanced view of how pediatric chronic care is being shaped by the integration of digital objects into the micro-interactions of the clinic. |
Taming the pediatric long-term tracheostomy- caring for and living with technology-dependent children
Ellinor Rydhamn Ledin - Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan
As the population of children living dependent on tracheostomies is expected to grow, thorough efforts are needed to better understand the challenges reported by these families face when this technology transitions from hospitals into private homes. According to the Domestication of Technology framework, technology and humans will be affected by the process of adapting to and living with each other. This study aimed to explore the process of domestication for parents of children dependent on long-term tracheostomy by conducting an abductive and reflexive thematic analysis of 13 interviews with parents, healthcare professionals, and personal care assistants. The analysis identified three themes present across all phases of domestication: Care Needs Governing Family Life, Defining Day-to-Day Living by Reliance on Assistance, and Unnoticed in the Societal System in an Unusual Situation. During appropriation, tracheostomy entered family life through medical necessity rather than voluntary adoption. In objectification and incorporation, the technology and the presence of personal care assistants became integrated into the home, reshaping routines and social relations. In conversion, parents developed extensive experiential expertise while navigating fragmented healthcare and welfare systems. These findings extend the Domestication of Technology framework by showing that domestication of life-sustaining medical technologies also involves negotiating institutional and social infrastructures enabling everyday life. |
Young Scholars in Medical Humanities Conference 2026
The interdisciplinary field of medical humanities moves beyond the idea that the humanities, along with the arts and social sciences, are either supportive of or oppositional to medicine. Instead, the current critical wave within the field recognises that health, illness, and medicine are produced through entangled social, cultural, political, and material processes, without which they cannot be fully understood (Viney et al. 2015; Fernyhough 2024). This understanding of the dynamics between medicine and the humanities creates an interdisciplinary space in which contributors from different disciplines can inform and challenge one another (Engebretsen, Fraas Henrichsen & Ødemark, 2020). Working across sites such as clinics, laboratories, and policies, critical medical humanities seeks not only to analyse medicine but to participate in its ongoing making and unmaking. This conference aims to explore how emerging scholars are shaping the future of the field of medical humanities.