Author Archives: Meg Martin

Meg Martin is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the University of California, San Francisco. Her dissertation explores the evolution of digital therapeutics as an industry space in tandem with its regulatory framework in the United States.
Image of trees and water at dawn, illustrating the "Dawn of Digital Therapeutics"

The Dawn of Digital Therapeutics

A techno-optimistic attitude tells us we’re living at an inflexion point where care practices are being transformed by technology. Monitoring and attending to health and well-being are no longer activities bound within physical spaces like hospitals and clinics; these activities have extended to the basic functions of smart phones. A new labor force has emerged for this digitized health transformation utilizing open source engineering platforms, structuring work into two-week Agile design sprints, and leveraging professionals from traditional healthcare settings. In many ways, the practices of these workers appear synonymous to those of other start-up companies across industry spaces. Throughout ethnographic fieldwork over the last year, I have explored the evolution of this phenomenon within an emergent area of the digital health sphere: Digital therapeutics. (read more...)