Abstract

Abstract

The development of digital health services is part of the increasing digitalization of our culture, and with the coming of global health crises, it has accelerated. Within digital health, we usually distinguish telehealth, eHealth, and mHealth, which bring the promise of the end of medical paternalism, all-accessible healthcare, and personalized medicine (Cerrato, Halamka 2019; Pew Research Centre 2022; Reardon 2017; Topol 2015). With the recent announcement of the creation of metaverse, the spotlight is directed at AR and VR technologies, for now primarily linked to the gamification of healthcare training. However, digital health also occasions challenges within the administrative, institutional, technological, and human areas (Mariscal, Herrera Rosado, Varela Castro 2018), which cast a shadow on the paradisiacal vision of the salvation from death and sickness through digitalization. While one has to recognize the obvious benefits digitalization is bringing to both patients and health professionals, one should also consider the price that needs to be paid for the participation in the dataistic utopia, concerning especially the human aspect, and the ensuing redefinition of some fundamental notions, like “health”, “autonomy” and “dignity” (Burr, Floridi 2020; Parsons 2019; Waters 2014). The purpose of the talk will be to sketch some of the challenges of digital health pointed to above, with particular attention to the concerns raised by scholars such as Harari (2016), Zuboff (2019), and van Beers (2022). They warn about “dataization” and “instrumentarianization” of human beings, which bring about a change in the relations between healthcare professionals and patients and in biopolitics and medical law. Significantly, the connection between the notions of “human,” “dignity,” and “dataism” will be brought to attention as destabilizing the current international legal frameworks based on the recognition of human dignity, but at the same time conditioning the entry to the digital world of the metaverse.