From human-centric digital health to digital One Health: Crucial new directions for mutual flourishing

Abstract

This brief communication puts forward an argument for expanding the concept of ‘digital health’ to that of ‘digital One Health’ by going beyond a human-centric approach to incorporating nonhuman agents, including other living things, places and space. One Health approaches recognise the interconnected and ecological dimensions of human health and wellbeing, but rarely focus on the role of digital technologies. A set of key questions can take the idea of digital One Health forward: (i) How can we learn more about and establish deeper connections with other animals and the natural environment through digital media, devices and data?; (ii) How can we attune humans to these more-than-human worlds using digital technologies, cultivating attentiveness and responsiveness?; (iii) How can we better develop and implement digital technologies that support the health and wellbeing of the planet and all its living creatures (including humans) so that all can flourish?; and (iv) How can digital technologies affect ecological systems, for better or for worse? Developing digital One Health expands both the digital health field and the One Health perspective, leading them into crucial new directions for mutual flourishing.

Full text

From human-centric digital health to digital One
Health: Crucial new directions for mutual
flourishing
Deborah Lupton
Abstract
This brief communication puts forward an argument for expanding the concept of ‘digital health’to that of ‘digital One
Health’by going beyond a human-centric approach to incorporating nonhuman agents, including other living things, places
and space. One Health approaches recognise the interconnected and ecological dimensions of human health and wellbeing,
but rarely focus on the role of digital technologies. A set of key questions can take the idea of digital One Health forward: (i)
How can we learn more about and establish deeper connections with other animals and the natural environment through
digital media, devices and data?; (ii) How can we attune humans to these more-than-human worlds using digital technolo-
gies, cultivating attentiveness and responsiveness?; (iii) How can we better develop and implement digital technologies that
support the health and wellbeing of the planet and all its living creatures (including humans) so that all can flourish?; and
(iv) How can digital technologies affect ecological systems, for better or for worse? Developing digital One Health expands
both the digital health field and the One Health perspective, leading them into crucial new directions for mutual flourishing.
Keywords
Digital health, One Health, more-than-human health, planetary health, digital media, climate crisis
Submission date: 23 June 2022; Acceptance date: 11 September 2022
Introduction
Most definitions and interpretations of ‘digital health’are
entirely human-centred. They focus on how digital
devices and software can be used to generate and share
health and medical information and experiences, help
people engage in self-care and monitor their bodily func-
tions and activities, provide remote healthcare, conduct
human disease surveillance and public health interventions,
and assist healthcare practitioners with medical diagnosis,
treatment and education.
1
A search of this journal’s
content, for example, surfaces very little material that dis-
cusses health issues beyond those experienced by
humans, perpetuating an anthropocentric focus. Yet it is
increasingly evident that simultaneously, the nonhuman
dimensions of the environments that people inhabit are
becoming increasingly digitised and datafied through the
use of sensors and monitoring technologies. These
include technologies such as digitised tagging systems,
video streaming services and surveillance drones used to
monitor the health and growth of livestock, wild animals
and pets. Digital sensors are used to monitor aspects of wil-
derness areas, oceans and waterways, agricultural land and
the built environment such as soil moisture levels, pollution
levels, geological movement, temperature, energy use and
transport systems.
2,3
On the part of digital health researchers, the risks and
harms to humans of ill-considered attempts to introduce
digital health technologies into healthcare, such as exacer-
bating inequalities, lack of digital access, or personal
Vitalities Lab, ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making and Society,
Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research Centre,
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia
Corresponding author:
Deborah Lupton, Vitalities Lab, ARC Centre for Automated Decision-Making
and Society, Centre for Social Research in Health and Social Policy Research
Centre, Goodsell Building, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 2052,
Australia.
Email: d.lupton@unsw.edu.au
Creative Commons NonCommercial-NoDerivs CC BY-NC-ND: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction
and distribution of the work as published without adaptation or alteration, without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on
the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Brief Communication
Digital Health
Volume 8: 1–4
© The Author(s) 2022
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/20552076221129103
journals.sagepub.com/home/dhj

health data breaches, have been extensively discussed.
4,5
However, commentators on digital health are only just
beginning to recognise and acknowledge the potential
effects on other animals, the climate and the environment
of the energy expenditure, ecological devastation, carbon
emissions and digital waste that are part of manufacturing,
distributing, using and disposing of digital health technolo-
gies and storing digital health data.
6
The One Health approach in medicine and public health,
initiated by veterinary scientists, brings together those inter-
ested in human health with those focused on animal health.
With a particular focus on the spread of zoonotic infectious
disease and the problem of anti-microbial resistance, this
approach considers the health status of humans to be
closely linked to that of other animals and microorgan-
isms.
7,8
One Health has therefore been characterised as a
paradigm shift.
8–10
Yet it has also been criticised for not
paying enough attention to other planetary health issues,
such as climate change and the destruction of the environ-
ment, and for insufficient critical recognition of sociocul-
tural and economic factors.
7,8,11
Furthermore, thus far,
contributors to the One Health literature have devoted sur-
prisingly little attention to the role of digital technologies in
planetary health. When they do so, it is usually in relation to
using devices and software to monitor pathogens and
disease in non-human animals or plants,
12
or how health
information is communicated using digital media.
13
A proposition for an affirmative digital One Health
What if we start to expand out the human-centred approach
to digital health –by changing the title to ‘digital One
Health’? How can the One Health perspective in turn
begin to acknowledge the role of digital technologies?
What would this mean for how we think in a more inclusive
way about human health, the health of other living creatures
and the environment that sees all these elements as part of a
whole?
Philosophically, my approach to digital One Health
draws on Rosi Braidotti’saffirmative ethics approach,
which adopts a more-than-human perspective. Such a per-
spective highlights the relationality of all things, human
and nonhuman, and considers how people can become
more sensitised to their connections with other creatures
and the environment so that mutual flourishing can occur:
or what Braidotti refers to as ‘generative life’.
14
To best
achieve a more expansive and affirmative approach to
One Health, identifying ways to enhance planetary health
that go beyond the identification and management of risk
is required.
7
It is here that the sociocultural dimensions of
people’s understandings and everyday practices and their
relationships with nonhuman beings, objects, place and
space need to be brought to the surface. This approach
aligns with what has been dubbed a ‘Radical One Health
Approach’
8
as well as incorporating a critical digital
health perspective.
5
Applying concepts and terms from the natural world to
new digital technologies is a longstanding practice. We
already routinely draw on organic and ecological metaphors
and images: the World Wide ‘Web’, computer ‘viruses’,
‘cloud’computing, the ‘rivers’or ‘tsunamis’of big data, arti-
ficial ‘intelligence’,‘neural’networks, digital ‘twins’…to
name merely a few.
15
Such biophilic language conveys the
deeply affective and meaningful relationships humans have
with nature.
16
I suggest an approach to conceptualising the
scope and focus of digital One Health that is underpinned
by the acknowledgement that humans use digital health tech-
nologies and data in more-than-human and more-than-digital
worlds.
17–19
Such an expansive approach brings together
more-than-human theory with such diverse fields as the envir-
onmental humanities, new media studies, science and tech-
nology studies, digital sociology, digital anthropology and
critical animal studies. It benefits from and builds on the
increasing attention and value that have been given to non-
western relational philosophies acknowledging the import-
ance of nonhuman agents in human health and wellbeing,
and vice versa.
20–22
A set of key questions can take the idea of digital One
Health forward. These include the following:
(i) How can we learn more about and establish deeper
connections with other animals and the natural envir-
onment through digital media, devices and data?
(ii) How can we attune humans to these more-than-human
worlds using digital technologies, cultivating atten-
tiveness and responsiveness?
(iii) How can we better develop and implement digital
technologies that support the health and wellbeing
of the planet and all its living creatures (including
humans) so that all can flourish?
(iv) How can digital technologies affect ecological
systems, for better or for worse (e.g. energy expend-
iture and electronic waste vs conservation/sustainable
technologies)?
Promising initiatives
Contributors to the growing literature on animal–computer
interaction studies and new media studies have begun to
show how digital technologies can be used to better
become attuned to and care for nonhuman animals
23,24
and engage in activism against animal cruelty and factory
farming.
25,26
Design fiction approaches have been used in
human–computer interaction studies to help people
imagine the future of automation in the context of climate
change.
27
Digital storytelling has been used as a way of pro-
viding a voice to Indigenous people to articulate their ethos
of connection, including their relationship with place and
the living and non-living occupants who cohabit with
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humans.
28
Citizen science initiatives using digital sensors
and other digitised data collection techniques have contrib-
uted to the amassing of databases about phenomena such as
the environmental effects of pollution, localised climate
change impacts, loss of species diversity and efforts to
regenerate cleared land.
19
Museums, science and art galleries and exhibitions
around the world have begun to experiment with using
digital technologies together with more-than-human ways
of seeing, doing, thinking and feeling. They have recog-
nised that processes of digitisation and datafication can con-
tribute to awakening humans’awareness of the delicate
balance of living creatures in local and global ecosystems.
Some promising initiatives are already beginning to
emerge that lead us in this direction. The ‘Feral Atlas:
The More-than-Human Anthropocene’digital project pub-
lished by Stanford University Press is one such
example.
29
This multidisciplinary collaboration brings
together anthropologists, artists, creative writers and scien-
tists. The website defines ‘feral ecologies’as ‘ecologies that
have been encouraged by human-built infrastructures, but
which have developed and spread beyond human
control’. It offers a playful interactive experience for visi-
tors, focused on surfacing the complexities of the entangle-
ments of humans with nonhuman species, place and space.
On the website, 79 field reports, featuring plants, fungi,
animals, diseases and pathogens as well as objects such
as plastic bags, trash, induced earthquakes, antibiotics and
toxic fog, can be explored.
Other examples of digital initiatives include attempts to
raise publics’awareness of anthropogenic environmental
destruction, species loss, emerging diseases and climate
change by bringing together public art with digital tech-
nologies.
30
For example, artist and academic Leah
Barclay creates augmented and virtual reality immersive
environments that layer soundscapes, sonic art and narra-
tives with place and space. These environments include
soundscapes of creatures living in aquatic ecosystems
across the planet, as well as forests and bushland. For
example, her CANOPY project brings the wildlife sounds
of the Amazon Rainforest to urban environments around
the globe. Listeners use their mobile devices to trigger geo-
located soundscapes as they walk through iconic locations.
At COP21 United Nations Conference on Climate Change
in Paris, this project was deployed to transform the Eiffel
Tower into a sonic rainforest.
31
This body of research and creative initiatives offer some
inspiring, capacious and creative ways forward for non-
anthropocentric digital health research, theory and techno-
logical development. Extending the One Health approach,
these perspectives can work towards an affirmative ethical
position that acknowledges the relational connections
between all things on the planet: from the microbiota
living in and people’s bodies to the mountains, oceans
and stars. When art and science are combined in
multisensory digitised environments, participants’minds,
senses and bodies can be opened to the potentials of
seeing and living with nonhumans as kin. In this age of eco-
logical/pandemic crisis, digital One Health is an exciting
and optimistic path forward for the protection and flourish-
ing of planetary health and wellbeing.
Acknowledgements: Not applicable.
Contributorship: DL is the sole author.
Declaration of conflicting interests: The author(s) declared no
potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research,
authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Ethical approval: Not applicable.
Funding: The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following
financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication
of this article: This work was supported by the Australian
Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated
Decision-Making and Society (grant no. CE200100005).
Guarantor: DL.
ORCID iD: Deborah Lupton https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2658-
4430
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