Associate Professor of Sociology, Faculty of Business, Government and Law, University of Canberra, University Drive, Bruce, ACT, 2617, Australia.
Associate Professor of the Social Study of Medicine, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Maastricht University, Maastricht, 6200MD, the Netherlands.
Soc Sci Med. 2021 May;277:113927. doi: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2021.113927. Epub 2021 Apr 20.
Sociological contributions on digital health have acknowledged the enduring significance of sensory work in diagnosis and practices of care. Previous explorations of these digital and sensory entanglements have focused separately on healthcare providers or patients/caregivers, rarely bringing these worlds together. Our analysis, based on the collation of ethnographic fieldwork in clinics, medical schools, and homes in Australia, offers rare insights into caregiver and practitioner perspectives. We interrogate the work involved in digital-sensory becoming, as caregivers (in our case parents) learn to assign diagnostic meaning to potential childhood disease. Working with Karen Barad's concept of 'intra-action', we demonstrate how diagnostic knowing is enacted between practitioners, parents, senses, and devices. We identify seven aspects of digital-sensory learning: attention to the change from normal; testing/searching for signs and symptoms; confirmation and direction from more experienced others; mimicry; analogy/metaphor; digital archiving; and reference to validated digitised signs. We found that this learning does not take place discretely in the clinic or at home. Doctors and parents both do digital-sensory work to register, co-witness, and mutually enact disease by interpreting signs and symptoms together in their caregiving intra-actions. Our article also champions collated ethnography as a methodological approach for making sense of complex assemblages in healthcare.
社会学界对数字健康的研究承认，在诊断和护理实践中，感官工作具有持久的重要意义。以前对这些数字和感官交织的探索分别关注医疗保健提供者或患者/护理人员，很少将这两个世界联系在一起。我们的分析基于在澳大利亚的诊所、医学院和家庭中进行的民族志实地调查，为护理人员和从业者的观点提供了难得的见解。我们探究了数字感官形成所涉及的工作，因为护理人员（在我们的案例中是父母）学会为潜在的儿童疾病赋予诊断意义。我们运用凯伦·巴纳德（Karen Barad）的“内在行动”概念，展示了从业者、父母、感官和设备之间如何实施诊断性知识。我们确定了数字感官学习的七个方面：关注正常状态的变化；测试/寻找迹象和症状；从更有经验的人那里获得确认和指导；模仿；类比/隐喻；数字存档；以及参考经过验证的数字化迹象。我们发现，这种学习不是在诊所或家中离散地进行的。医生和父母都通过共同解释他们的护理内在行动中的迹象和症状来进行数字感官工作，以登记、共同见证和相互实施疾病。我们的文章还倡导汇集民族志作为一种方法学方法，用于理解医疗保健中复杂的组合。
