Wireless Heart Patients and the Quantified Self

Research output: Contribution to journalJournal articleResearchpeer-review

Remote monitoring of implantable cardioverter defibrillator (ICD) patients links patients wirelessly to the clinic via a box in their bedroom. The box transmits data from the ICD to a remote database accessible to clinicians without patient involvement. Data travel across time and space; clinicians can monitor patients from a distance and instantly know about cardiac events. Based on ethnographic fieldwork in two Danish hospitals, this article explores the configuration of the wireless ICD patient by following a number of patients through hospitalisation, implantation, in-clinic follow-up, and remote monitoring. Wireless therapy, we argue, scripts the patient as data. In high-tech clinical encounters, data are enacted as extensions and copies of the patient, and even proxies that, in patients’ experiences, may turn into identity thieves. In illuminating the multiple positions that data take in such clinical encounters and in patients’ experiences we discuss the ambiguities that arise when patients go wireless.

Original languageEnglish
JournalBody and Society
Volume23
Issue number1
Pages (from-to)64-90
ISSN1357-034X
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2017

    Research areas

  • cyborg, e-health, ethnography, network, quantified self, technology, wireless

ID: 196044872