The Doctor Who Wasn’t There: Technology, History, and the Limits of Telehealth - Livestream

The Holter monitor, a portable box that has broadcasted the electrical activity of human hearts for nearly 75 years, has become such a common object in clinical medicine that few pause to consider its origins. Indeed, as a succession of newer Wi-Fi - and Cloud-enabled devices, smartphone apps, and other “wearables” now claim to revolutionize healthcare, it is easy to overlook older instruments of medical surveillance. But in 1949, when Norman Holter first fitted a wearable FM-radio to track and record the functioning of patients’ hearts in their domestic worlds, he envisioned “a more general project of broadcasting physiological data” from homes and workplaces and transmitting it to analytic systems to be interpreted.  The early history of physiological surveillance, I argue, had more impact on who was newly granted expertise to receive and interpret health data as it did the data itself.

Speaker: Jeremy Greene, Johns Hopkins University

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