Digital health: Is the glass half-full or half-empty?

摘要

After years of enthusiasm around digital health and its limitless promises, last year a wave of scepticism rose from a strong voice -that of the UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. In October 2019, his office submitted a report [1] highlighting the risk of a gloomy digital future (or "digital dystopia") where rampant digital development could rapidly turn to automate predicting, identifying, surveillance, detecting, targeting and punishing. The report rapidly became a reference for many and the debate around digital health became progressively polarized. In light of the ongoing COVID19 pandemic and global initiatives to promote social distancing, mobile telephony and digital health has again grabbed the spotlight. New digital solutions against coro-navirus have flourished: from the popular dashboard [2] created by Johns Hopkins University where one can monitor the worldwide spread of the virus, to widely-available telemedicine services to avoid overwhelming care facilities, prioritise acute COVID19 cases and prevent unnecessary spread of infection, and even artificial intelligence (AI) driven systems which can read a CT scan and diagnose COVID19 in a few seconds [3], and a plethora of Chatbots for self-diagnosis.