Victims of digital health?
Service users and healthcare practitioners as neglected system operators.
Digital health technology aims to boost our health and wellbeing, or to improve health systems. It includes smartphone apps, wearable devices (such as step trackers), technology to monitor medical conditions at home, and platforms that provide remote healthcare. Digital health is much vaunted and is everywhere, but its significant benefits are only sporadically realised.
Drawing on long experience as an Occupational/Human Factors Psychologist, Professor Ridley sets out a key problem: the incorporation of new technology into complex, safety critical systems. This brings opportunities that can quickly become challenges if we fail to identify, characterise and develop system users. What can be done to deal with this issue?
Professor Donald Ridley is a BPS Chartered Psychologist and an HCPC Registered Practitioner Occupational Psychologist. He has developed community mental health services in Russia, and addiction treatment services and refugee/IDP education in Georgia. Since 2007, he has played trombone in the Trans-Siberian March Band; a world music ensemble playing riotous dance music from Eastern Europe and the Balkans!