Big Mother

Editorial from ICTjournal, december 2020 (translated from French by DeepL with human help)

Mid-September, Apple announced its partnership with the Government of Singapore for LumiHealth, a national health initiative based on its connected watch. The eponymous app encourages residents to adopt a healthier lifestyle by performing personalized exercises and challenges recommended by the system. 

This unprecedented collaboration illustrates the ongoing shift or expansion of digitization towards the field of well-being. While present for years, that trend gained new momentum with the pandemic and the use of apps, smartphones and other commercial wearables for health purposes, whether for quarantine monitoring, disease diagnosis or exposure notification, as in the case of Swisscovid.

After a decade of intensive use of digital technologies in advertising profiling and its share of scandals, the digital world of the post-Covid decade may have a more benevolent face. After adtech and the digitalization of marketing to enhance customer experience, the 2020s may be the decade of empathic technologies and the digitalization of human care and employee experience. 

These developments would not be possible without the rise of sensors and artificial intelligence techniques. Trained with body data, algorithms diagnose Covid-19 in the sound of a cough, just as they detect a nightmare in heartbeat and wrist movements. 

These innovations would not be possible either, without a society willing to embrace them. At a time when the body is regarded as an artefact whose functioning must be optimized, an overwhelming and impossible responsibility weighs on individuals. And it is tempting to delegate that burden to digital mothering devices, which ensure that we adopt healthy habits with the blessing of health authorities.

Issues of privacy and discrimination were the main ethical issues for profiling technologies. With wellness technologies, the main issue could be the agency and autonomy of individuals.