Speakers

	The scientific program has been created by Minna Ruckenstein
	Minna Ruckenstein works as an associate professor at the Consumer Society Research Centre and the Helsinki Center for Digital Humanities, University of Helsinki. The disciplinary underpinnings of her research range from anthropology, science and technology studies, communication to consumer economics. Ruckenstein has studied digital health developments from a number of perspectives, exploring direct-to-consumer genetic testing and self-tracking technologies. She is also an expert in questions around datafication of health and uses of digital methods in the health realm. Ruckenstein has published widely in top-quality international journals.

	Thomas Blomseth Christensen is recognized as one of the most experienced and influential self-trackers in the global Quantified Self community—both as a technologist and someone seeking to discover things about himself. Most widely known for tracking his every sneeze for the past seven years he has effectively cured himself of his allergies and eczema through long-running experiments with his lifestyle. In the process he has collected a unique dataset of over hundred thousand observations made by paying attention to his subjective experience and daily living. He is working on next-generation technology for self-tracking and human augmentation as co-founder of TOTTI Labs and Flowrunner.

Gustav From, MD, Consultant in Gastroenterology. In charge of quality and patient safety in an abdominal center in Copenhagen, in which EPIC was implemented in May 2017. He holds a PhD in health informatics. His work focusses on the frictions which appear between clinical work and informatics at conceptual and reality levels. In accordance, the topic is approached from a scientific as well as a practical angle.

Linda Hogle, Ph.D. is a Professor in the School of Medicine & Public Health at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Her scholarly research as a social scientist builds on her background in clinical medical technology and healthcare strategic management to explore medical technology innovations within broader social, ethical and policy landscapes. In particular, she focuses on regenerative medicine and more recently, social and infrastructural changes related to data-driven medicine. Beyond the tensions that exist between the need to protect patient privacy and researchers’ desire to access individual-specific clinical data, she explores less-visible uses of personal information in clinical, bioscience & health policy research. She asks what comes to count as “medical” data, how might clinical practice change, and what kinds of infrastructures are emerging in the context of value-based medicine.

Mikko Lehtovirta, Post-doctoral researcher in the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FiMM), University of Helsinki. PhD in Medicine from University of Helsinki. While his main research focus is on genetics of type 2 diabetes, he also studies mobile technologies in health care and behaviour change.

Stine Lomborg, Associate Professor in Communication and IT at the University of Copenhagen. She holds a PhD in Media Studies from Aarhus University. Her research centers on how people live and communicate through digital media. Her current research explores self-tracking in the context of personal life, working life and in key welfare institutions such as the public health care system in Denmark.

Johan Lundin, MD, PhD is a Research Director at the Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM), University of Helsinki, Finland and a Professor of Medical Technology at Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. His overall research aims are to study the use of digital technologies and artificial intelligence for improvement of diagnostics and care of the individual patient.

Päivi Metsäniemi, MD, is a specialist of public health medicine and has a special competence degree in healthcare technology. She works now as Chief Medical Officer in Finnish Student Health Services (FSHS). She is enthusiastic about measuring and improving healthcare outcomes, developing the work processes, digital tools and working environment for physicians and other healthcare professionals. The digitalization of healthcare with all its benefits and challenges are the core of Päivi’s own working life, as she has implemented virtual doctor's appointment processes, created models for using everyday healthcare data in clinical leadership and innovated and implemented a customer-centric digital health plan.

Kristiina Patja is a director of continuous professional development of physicians in Finland (Pro Medico) and a consultant in health promotion, policy and digital solutions in Healthy Trace Ltd. She is an MD. Ph.D. and a Specialist in Health Care as well as an Adjunct Professor in Public Health. She has degrees as a Clinical supervisor, Special competency in Medical education (FMA) and Specialist Qualification in Management. She works as a medical director in Wellness Foundry Ltd. She has worked over 15 years developing and studying tools that enable healthier choices for people and professionals.

Michael Quarshie is the founder and CEO of Wellness Foundry. Wellness Foundry's main product is MealLogger, an AI-based nutrition coaching platform. MealLogger uses machine vision and machine learning to analyze meal images and related data to create scalable nutrition counselling services for clients ranging from pro sports organizations to insurance carriers and health organizations. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Michael was a professional athlete with the Oakland Raiders (NFL). Michael is also one of the founders and the chairman of Walter, a Finnish non-profit organization preventing social exclusion and bullying at schools and promoting intercultural communication among youth. Michael is a graduate of Columbia University in New York.

Sara Riggare, MSc, PhD cand, is an engineer from the Swedish Royal Institute of Technology currently finalising her doctoral education at Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. Seven years ago she decided to combine her training with her patient experiences to improve the healthcare situation for herself and others with chronic diseases. Sara’s work and research at the Health Informatics Centre is focused around different aspects of patients’ perspectives in healthcare and research. She explores how patients can learn from their own observations, grounded in her own experiences with managing Parkinson’s disease for over 30 years. Sara is one of the leading self-trackers of Parkinson’s disease in the world.
UNFORTUNATELY CANSELLED

Natasha Dow Schüll is a cultural anthropologist and associate professor in the department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She is the author of Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas (2012), an ethnographic exploration of the relationship between technology design and the experience of addiction. Her current book project, Keeping Track (forthcoming), concerns the rise of digital self-tracking technologies and the new modes of introspection and self-governance they engender. She has published numerous articles on the theme of digital media and subjectivity, and her research has been featured in such national media venues as 60 Minutes, The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, and The Atlantic.

Tamar Sharon, Associate Professor in Philosophy of Technology at Radboud University in the Netherlands. She holds a PhD in interdisciplinary studies from Bar Ilan University, Israel. Her research explores the societal and ethical impacts of new and emerging health-related technologies in a context of shifting understandings of health, citizenship and participation. Her current project, on the “Googlization of health and the common good”, aims to develop normative responses to the challenges posed by digital health innovation to public values and the common good.

Gary Wolf is co-founder of the Quantified Self and the executive director of the Article 27 Foundation, which supports personal discovery through everyday science. His work focuses on new methods of learning about ourselves using our own self-collected data.

Grants and symposiums

Speakers