Concluding a very successful year for the BCSSS Research Groups ‘Human Digitalization’ as well as ‘Systems Medicine and Health Care Systems’, BCSSS Vice President Felix Tretter organized the sixth symposium in the series of Big Data and Health events on November 20 to 21.

Since fall 2018, the group had been examining several unintended side effects of digitalization in a series of expert workshops and symposia. The aim of the previous workshops (WS I-IV) was to examine the epistemic value of individual features of the digitization of our society, especially with regard to Big Data as processing technology, as well as health-related digital technologies (DHT) and issues with Assessment in Human Digitalization in Health Affairs (HDIHA). The goal of the workshop series is to make cyber-systemic perspectives of living systems explicit.

The expert meeting was started by Klaus Miesenberger (Informatics, University Linz) with a review on problems and promises of ICT for people with special needs, an issue that is strongly underrepresented in political and academic discourse. Marc Batschkus (Archiware GmbH Munich, FRG) returned to the BCSSS once more and brought news about digitalization in health care in Germany. Gerd Sumah (Delegate Software AG) completed the first day with presenting current issues of quality assessment of ‘Snics’, a dietary coaching app.

On day two, Barbara Prainsack (Institute for Political Science, University of Vienna) opened the discussion about current ethical and legal issues. The discourse on ethical matters with assessment scales was continued by Alexander Degelsegger-Marquiz and Barbara Piso (GOEG, Vienna). Returning to BCSSS as a visitor as well, Horst Kunhardt (TU Deggendorf, FRG) gave insight into technical issues with data security in practical research projects.

View the documentation on previous workshops here:

Workshop I: Big Data – Epistemological Requests of Systems Science

Workshop II: The “Truth” about health and disease by Big Data

Workshop III: Evaluating Health-Related ICT (hICT)

Workshop IV: Evaluation scales for Digital Health Technology Assessment (DHTA)

Workshop V: Issues of Assessment in Human Digitalization in Health Affairs (HDIHA)