TILT Conference 2015 (22-23 April): Call for Papers
CALL FOR PAPERS: TILT – Tilburg Institute for Law, Technology, and Society brings to your attention the bi-annual multidisciplinary conference TILTing Perspectives on Technology Regulation
UNDER OBSERVATION – Synergies, benefits and trade-offs of eHealth and surveillance
Tilburg, The Netherlands, 22-23 April 2015
Conference Theme: The notion that people are ‘under observation’ has multiple connotations. Bringing together two hitherto unrelated streams of scholarship interested in observation —eHealth and surveillance studies—this conference aims to inspire cross-fertilisation and bring new insights into the legal, ethical and social meanings of being ‘under observation’.
Care for an aging population and for patients with chronic conditions is expensive. Staying healthy is actively encouraged by policy and practice. Use of eHealth solutions to this end is especially encouraged, as these applications are considered to be ‘lean’, cheap and capable of offering access to healthcare and lifestyle management anywhere, any time. Recent developments in mobile eHealth have led to wearable sensors that gather health data in real time and help take charge of our wellbeing, while Big Data Analytics and Predictive Analytics promise better understanding of disease, prevention and treatment.
But these technologies are not without their caveats. Most notably, they create new opportunities for surveilling and steering health-related behaviours. Recent scholarship on the relationship between the development of new technologies and trends in surveillance points to the multi-directional and mutual nature of the latter. In the field of health, this means that not only are patients watched by technologies, physicians, etc. but also that they are increasingly watching.
These new trends are in line with a general tendency to seek solutions to societal problems – crime, resource allocation, child welfare – in data aggregation, monitoring, profiling and behaviour tracking.
We therefore invite legal, ethical, and social scholars and practitioners, philosophers of technology and engineers, as well as persons working in the areas of health (including eHealth), assisted living, sensor technology, surveillance studies, data protection, data security and privacy to join us in exploring these developments during a two-day conference. We will explore
and discuss the synergies, benefits and trade-offs of developments in eHealth and related changes in surveillance structures and practices.
See full call here
