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Health technology has the potential to help people take control of their health — but it’s not helping everyone, experts say. why? Because the models weren’t designed for everyone.
“When we make informed decisions and when we build technologies and tools to provide health care practices or care experiences to people, we build those models outside of the ‘reference person,'” said Danica Kelly, co-founder and woman of My Normative – a focused health platform. “The ‘reference man’ is a 70 kg, 20- to 30-year-old white, cisgender male. As a result, there are these inequities and health outcomes across gender and sexuality and other demographics.
Kelly said this during a panel on health technology and personal care on Thursday. HIMSS 2023 Conference in Chicago.
Panelist Dr. Talia Miron-Shatz, author and consultant, echoed Kelly’s comments. She adds that people using health technology are interacting with something someone has created for you based on their assumptions about who you are and what you can do. And sometimes they think too much.
Miron Shat said that there are many discriminatory views in relation to health technology, including ageism. Older people often struggle with using technology – but this can change when provided with support and guidance, she added.
As an example of how to do this, Miron-Shatz A Research She worked on it, and the researchers developed an app to help older adults adhere to their medications and installed it on iPads. They placed a sticker with the “on” button, offered a home visit and showed the elderly how to use the app. The study showed that the application improved the adherence among the elderly.
“We shouldn’t be discouraged when we look at older people or populations that are not digitally literate,” Miron-Shatz said. “We need to make our products more accessible to them. We need to show them the implications clearly. And maybe we need to consider hybrid models.”
Kelly argued that building technologies that take other demographics into account should be the norm.
“It doesn’t have to be extra to consider our seniors. It shouldn’t be extra to consider our baby population. It shouldn’t be extra to consider women and girls,” Kelly said. … Otherwise we blame the elderly for not knowing how to use technology that we didn’t build. … Blaming people for not being an actual part of the technologies we build and deploy is problematic.
Photo: Irina Deveva, Getty Images
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