Interdisciplinary perspectives on digital technologies for global mental health.

Digital Mental Health Technologies (DMHTs) have the potential to close treatment gaps in settings where mental healthcare is scarce or even inaccessible. For this, DMHTs need to be affordable, evidence-based, justice-oriented, user-friendly, and embedded in a functioning digital infrastructure. This viewpoint discusses areas crucial for future developments of DMHTs.

Can digital health democratize health care?

Much has been said about the potential of digital health technologies for democratizing health care. But how exactly is democratization with digital health technologies conceptualized and what does it involve? We investigate debates on the democratization of health care with digital health and identify that democratization is being envisioned as a matter of access to health information, health care, and patient empowerment. However, taking a closer look at the growing pool of empirical data on digital health, we argue that these technologies come short of materializing these goals, given the unequal health outcomes they facilitate.

Patient-led innovation and global health justice: Open-source digital health technology for type 1 diabetes care.

Health innovation is mainly envisioned in direct connection to medical research institutions or pharmaceutical and technology companies. Yet, these types of innovation often do not meet the needs and expectations of individuals affected by health conditions. With the emergence of digital health technologies and social media, we can observe a shift, which involves people living with illness modifying and improving medical and health devices outside of the formal research and development sector, figuring both as users and innovators.

Fair and equitable AI in biomedical research and healthcare: Social science perspectives.

Artificial intelligence (AI) offers opportunities but also challenges for biomedical research and healthcare. This position paper shares the results of the international conference "Fair medicine and AI" (online 3-5 March 2021). Scholars from science and technology studies (STS), gender studies, and ethics of science and technology formulated opportunities, challenges, and research and development desiderata for AI in healthcare.

Digital surveillance in a pandemic response: What bioethics ought to learn from Indigenous perspectives.

Our paper interrogates the ethics of digital pandemic surveillance from Indigenous perspectives. The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that Indigenous peoples are among the communities most negatively affected by pandemic infectious disease spread. Similarly to other racialized subpopulations, Indigenous people have faced strikingly high mortality rates from COVID-19 owing to structural marginalization and related comorbidities, and these high rates have been exacerbated by past and present colonial dominance.

Proceedings from the CIH Symposium 2020 on "eHealth: Trends and innovations".

Electronic Health (eHealth) is the use of information and communication technologies for health and plays a significant role in improving public health. The rapid expansion and development of eHealth initiatives allow researchers and healthcare providers to connect more effectively with patients. The aim of the CIH Symposium 2020 was to discuss the current challenges facing the field, opportunities in eHealth implementation, to share the experiences from different healthcare systems, and to discuss future trends addressing the use of digital platforms in health.

Digital contact tracing and exposure notification: ethical guidance for trustworthy pandemic management.

There is growing interest in contact tracing apps (CT apps) for pandemic management. It is crucial to consider ethical requirements before, while, and after implementing such apps. In this paper, we illustrate the complexity and multiplicity of the ethical considerations by presenting an ethical framework for a responsible design and implementation of CT apps.

Pandemic Surveillance and Racialized Subpopulations: Mitigating Vulnerabilities in COVID-19 Apps.

Debates about effective responses to the COVID-19 pandemic have emphasized the paramount importance of digital tracing technology in suppressing the disease. So far, discussions about the ethics of this technology have focused on privacy concerns, efficacy, and uptake. However, important issues regarding power imbalances and vulnerability also warrant attention.

The direct-to-consumer market for stem cell-based interventions in Australia: exploring the experiences of patients.

The prevalence of businesses selling autologous stem cell-based interventions to patients in Australia has raised serious concerns about how weaknesses in regulation have enabled the emergence of an industry that engages in aggressive marketing of unproven treatments to patients. Little is known about how patients experience this marketing and their subsequent interactions with practitioners. This paper reports results from 15 semistructured interviews with patients and carers, and also draws upon discussion conducted with patients, carers and family members (22 participants) in a workshop setting.

Is 'gender disappointment' a unique mental illness?

'Gender disappointment' is the feeling of sadness when a parent's strong desire for a child of a certain sex is not realised. It is frequently mentioned as a reason behind parents' pursuit of sex selection for social reasons. It also tends to be framed as a mental disorder on a range of platforms including the media, sex selection forums and among parents who have been interviewed about sex selection.

Boy Interrupted - Biographical disruption during the transition to adulthood.

Most studies on the gendered aspects of biographical disruption are predicated on adult experiences of chronic illness, often based on heterogeneous samples. This paper goes beyond typologies by analysing the life-history case study of 'Sam', a 23-year-old Australian man raised in a refugee family, who developed a disabling chronic health condition at 15 years of age. The analysis illustrates how critical contextual factors like life-phase, combine with powerful social structures like ethnicity and gender to shape Sam's experiences of, and responses to, biographical disruption.

Vulnerabilities and the Use of Autologous Stem Cells for Medical Conditions in Australia.

Australia has a booming market of unproven autologous stem cell- based interventions (SCBIs) for a wide range of medical conditions. Multiple SCBIs are provided in private practices outside of formal clinical trials. Some defend the provision of unproven SCBIs on grounds of patient choice.

Open for business: a comparative study of websites selling autologous stem cells in Australia and Japan.

This article examines online marketing practices of Japanese and Australian clinics offering putative autologous stem cell treatments. We conducted google searches for keywords related to stem cell therapy and stem cell clinics in English and Japanese. We identified websites promoting 88 point-of-sale clinics in Japan and 70 in Australia.

A Feminist Critique of Justifications for Sex Selection.

This paper examines dominant arguments advocating for the procreative right to undergo sex selection for social reasons, based on gender preference. I present four of the most recognized and common justifications for sex selection: the argument from natural sex selection, the argument from procreative autonomy, the argument from family balancing, and the argument from children's well-being. Together these represent the various means by which scholars aim to defend access to sex selection for social reasons as a legitimate procreative choice.

The deadly business of an unregulated global stem cell industry.

In 2016, the Office of the State Coroner of New South Wales released its report into the death of an Australian woman, Sheila Drysdale, who had died from complications of an autologous stem cell procedure at a Sydney clinic. In this report, we argue that Mrs Drysdale's death was avoidable, and it was the result of a pernicious global problem of an industry exploiting regulatory systems to sell unproven and unjustified interventions with stem cells.