Digital Health and Telemedicine: Lessons From the Past, Current Trends and New Challenges

Full Title:
Digital Health and Telemedicine: Lessons From the Past, Current Trends and New Challenges

Speaker:
Dr. Carlo Botrugno, PhD
Researcher at the Department of Legal Sciences
Coordinator of the Research Unit on Everyday Bioethics and Ethics of Science
L'Altro Diritto Inter-university Research Centre
University of Florence

Abstract
The talk critically retraces some of the most recent developments related to the digitalization of healthcare and the virtualization of medical practice, problematizing their impact from an ethical perspective. These processes cannot be seen merely as mechanisms through which data taken from patients’ bodies are extracted, collected, and processed for additional purposes. Instead, they bring to light a new kind of corporeality, where the patient's body is continuously disaggregated and recomposed into a virtual entity that works as a permanent health data archive. From this perspective, these processes contribute to establishing more intense relations between people, technological artifacts, spaces, places, and knowledge, thus triggering ethically ambivalent effects. Indeed, while they relegate some sources of medical knowledge to the background – i.e., those linked to the sensory perception of the doctor and the patient – they also create new forms of knowledge that derive from complex assemblages between material and virtual factors, which unavoidably reshape medical practice and medical epistemology itself.

Additional Details:
The event is free and is open to the general public.