During the 5th SILFS Postgraduate Conference on Logic and Philosophy of Science of the Italian Society of Logic and Philosophy of Science (SILFS), held at the University of Milano-Bicocca from the 13th to the 17th of June 2022, Stefano Canali, post-doc researcher at the Department of Electronics, Information and Bioengineering of the Politecnico di Milano, won the Best Presentation Award in the Philosophy of Biology and Medicine section. The prize was awarded for the paper “Wearables as P-medicine Technology: Identyfing Epistemic Relations and Issues”, based on the work done alongside Prof. Andrea Aliverti and Prof. Viola Schiaffonati.
The paper addresses the ethical and epistemological issues raised by wearable biomedical devices capable of tracking biomedical parameters, whose use is promising both for biomedical research and clinical care. The article starts by showing that that wearable devices share principles, goals, and methods with p-medicine, an umbrella term that encapsulates attempts to increase the personalisation, precision, prevention, and person-centredness of medicine. On the basis, two main challenges affecting the use of wearable technology for health are presented. First, the paper highlights that the variability of wearable devices and the lack of information on the contextuality of data collection make it difficult to assess data quality, raising questions on the representativity and inclusion of wearable data. Second, the article shows that screening and prediction based on wearables lead to several cases where conditions are overestimated, raising questions on the reliability and legitimacy of wearables for health. As a conclusion, identifying these challenges and discussing their implications is crucial to improve our understanding of the contribution of new technologies to biomedical research and clinical care.