This paper attends to the spatial reconfiguration of socio-material care arrangements through the use of eDevices in epilepsy.
Long abstract:
In recent years, there has been a great increase of consumer-oriented and clinically certified health technologies available, enabling patients and caregivers to collect large amounts of data in their everyday lives at home. This is also the case in epilepsy, where eDevices have found their way into the lives of patients, transforming both treatment and care practices.
Based on fieldwork conducted among people with epilepsy and their relatives who use a variety of technological devices to monitor and handle everyday life with epilepsy, I will discuss how data from digital health technologies creates and transforms therapeutic spaces (Trnka 2021). I will look at how different therapeutic spaces can contain different forms of data and attend to how e.g. health data from a smart watch is used by and helpful to a person with epilepsy at home but not seen as valuable in a consultation room by the same person. Inspired by assemblage theory (e.g. Schwennesen 2019) I will look at the implications of certain data being integrated into and transforming some socio-material care arrangements but not others.