List #1 - Digital Healthcare Trails
Virtual reality & AI-based counselling, your health data for sale, human rights & digital tech
What I’m reading:
🚦 Google Is Slurping Up Health Data—and It Looks Totally Legal, Wired, 11 November.
🧠 Elon Musk said his AI-brain-chips company could 'solve' autism and schizophrenia, Business Insider, 14 November.
💊The rise of microchipping: Are we ready for technology to get under the skin? The Guardian.
💻 Why People Demanded Privacy to Confide in the World’s First Chatbot IEEE Spectrum. (Interestingly, the first ‘chatterbot’ was created using psychoanalytic knowledge and users demanded privacy but not for the reason you might think).
👩⚕️Digital Psychiatry: Ethical Risks and Opportunities for Public Health and Well-Being Christopher Burr et al at the University of Oxford - Oxford Internet Institute.
Some recent pieces from me:
📄Mapping the rise of digital mental health technologies: Emerging issues for law and society
The use of digital technologies in mental health initiatives is expanding, leading to calls for clearer legal and regulatory frameworks. However, gaps in knowledge about the scale and nature of change impede efforts to develop responsible public governance in the early stages of what may be the mass uptake of ‘digital mental health technologies’. This article maps established and emerging technologies in the mental health context with an eye to locating major socio-legal issues.
A submission on human rights and new and emerging digital technologies in the mental health context. I will frame my brief submission with reference to the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (‘CRPD’). The Human Rights Council has expressed its commitment to the rights of persons with mental health conditions and psychosocial disability in its 2017 Resolution on Mental Health and Human Rights. The Council has also recognised the potential of new and emerging digital technologies to ‘promote and protect the enjoyment of the rights of persons with disabilities’. Several technologies demonstrate this potential, while others highlight the risks they may pose.
**This is my inaugural post! Thanks to the early subscribers. Any feedback or suggested readings most welcome!**
Byline image: "Parallel Places" by Daniel Medina is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0