Paper short abstract:

We critically reflect on the role of ‘embedded social scientists’ in various digital health technology initiatives, describing emerging tensions and risks, and collectively probing more general modes of intervention and action repertoires to enable responsible and ethical innovation.

Paper long abstract:

Social scientists are increasingly involved in large health technology consortia to enhance the societal relevance and acceptability of the innovations that are developed, tested, or implemented. In this presentation, we critically reflect on the role of such ‘embedded social scientists’ in various digital health technology initiatives. How can we as social scientists contribute to responsible development by acting with hospital actors, patients, policy makers, data scientists and technological industry in productive ways? What kind of tensions can emerge between the different goals and interests of involved stakeholders, including ourselves? What are emerging risks and normative complexities for researchers and how can we solve or work around and/or with these? Based on our experiences in several consortia and partnerships for the development of digital technologies in health and welfare, we describe three tensions emerging from the conflicting agendas, goals, and expectations of different stakeholders, zooming in on how we navigated this normative complexity.

We hope this and other presentations on empirical research projects of scholars reflecting on their involvement in technology consortia in health and welfare can serve as the basis for a broader and interactive dialogue session and workshop with the audience. In the dialogue session we aim to tease out more general modes of intervention and action repertoires to enable responsible and ethical innovation. In the workshop we translate these insights into a set of sensitivities aimed to help researchers to more consciously navigate some of the dilemmas and normative complexities and allow them to intervene more effectively.