What do you, personally, think you will remember most about this interview a year from now?
The most salient piece of Susan Murphy's discussion was how the usage of mobile health research helps us identify and become self aware of our surroundings and the people who surround us. That is, mobile health collects so much data about us so that we can become more aware of how we feel. Mobile health can efficiently comb through huge datasets and identify trends that we may find it hard it to notice, especially because we as humans may be subject to many biases and sometimes be blinded to conclusions. By noticing the influences in our lives (whether positive or negative), we can accordingly plan for the things we want to do.
How do you think any aspect of the interview will affect your own future, or society's future?
This interview highlighted mobile health's room for good, as it makes control of one's health much more accessible and personalizable. At the same time though, the interview made me feel that mobile health still lacks some of what makes us trust healthcare (and especially doctors). For example, I trust the weather forecast with fair amount of accuracy even though the prediction is made for everyone who lives in the area. However, I don't know if I'd trust a predictive machine to inform me about my health and make recommendations. I'd still rather visit a human doctor and speak to them to give me an informed recommendation. Of course, it's very possible that the human doctor performs worse than a predictive machine (either by giving a bad diagnosis or poor recommendations). Still, from an emotional perspective, I'd feel better with a doctor who could speak to me and give their opinion. Societally, it could make access to healthcare much easier and cheaper, and especially in lower income areas with less healthcare, could make drastic improvements. Thus, mobile health is a field that should be continually improved upon to improve trust and accuracy and perhaps one day shape healthcare.
I have to echo your concerns regarding whether the general public would feel inclined to trust automated "blackbox"-style diagnoses. On an emotional level, humans generally prefer to interface with other humans, and while a data-driven system has the possibility to diagnose a patient based purely on their health data, I feel as though human doctors that build a relationship with their patients would be able to pick up on subtle emotional cues that a computer may not pick up on or even consider as a factor. Additionally, I'd have concerns regarding how years of institutionalized prejudices in medical diagnoses (misogynoir, ableism, fatphobia, transphobia, etc) would affect the data that these systems would be trained on.