{"title":"How Algorithmic Technologies 'Constitute' the Older Body: A Study of Fall-Detection Wearables.","authors":"Geoffrey Mead, Barbara B Neves, Alex Broom","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70219","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70219","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The cultural politics of the 'problematic' ageing body have led to a search for solutions in the form of algorithmic technologies. In this article, we look at one problem associated with the ageing body-unintentional falls-and one proposed algorithmic intervention: wearable fall-detection technology. In dialogue with sociologists concerned with the cultural politics of the older body, we aim to understand what contribution this fledgling technology makes to how the older body is 'constituted'. To do this, we examine a sample of datasets containing measurements of individuals' movements and falls (which researchers have made available to train algorithms for use in fall-detection wearables). In contrast to existing attempts to grasp how older users are scripted into technology, which focus on explicit ideas about them, we trace how individual subjects are formatted in these datasets. We find that these individuals become fragmented in the data, rendered into movements abstracted from the bodies that carry them out and the locations in which they take place. The older body is constituted, then, as a risky, deviant set of movements through space, irreducible to its component parts.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70219"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13306533/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148332516","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christopher R Browning, Bethany Boettner, Catherine A Calder, Elisabeth Root
{"title":"Economic Cynicism, COVID-19 and Deaths of Despair in Rural Ohio Counties.","authors":"Christopher R Browning, Bethany Boettner, Catherine A Calder, Elisabeth Root","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70227","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70227","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Research on urban community effects on health has considered a range of collective social processes as potential links between economic disadvantage and health. We extend this focus to deaths of despair (DoD; drug overdose mortality and suicide) in rural counties by examining the association between a novel indicator of economic cynicism (perceptions that local communities have been 'left behind' economically) and DoD. We also consider a range of other aspects of social climate potentially relevant to health, including social network ties, collective efficacy and social and physical disorder. We draw on data from the 2018 Ohio Community Resilience Study to estimate county-level social process measures. Multilevel models of 2018-2022 age-adjusted DoD rates in 39 rural Ohio counties indicate that economic cynicism is associated with prepandemic rates of DoD and COVID-19 pandemic-associated increases in drug overdose mortality. Generalised structural equation models indicate that economic cynicism attenuates the association between economic disadvantage and drug overdose mortality by roughly 27% and the association with suicide by 50%. We discuss the importance of community-level social processes as factors in understanding rural area vulnerability to DoD.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70227"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13343394/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148405520","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"In Search of Genetic Agency: On the Uses and Actionability of Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Test Results in Biohacking Practices.","authors":"Carsten Stage","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70237","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70237","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>The article examines why and with what consequences biohacking individuals use direct-to-consumer genetic tests (DTC GTs). Based on thematic coding of 15 semi-structured interviews, it argues that these users generally see themselves as capable of generating actionable knowledge to optimise future health by manipulating their 'milieu'. DTC GTs are integrated into this perspective as a knowledge technology for prevention and optimisation. However, informants often find it difficult to translate DTC test results into concrete action and the study identifies their different strategies for making this type of knowledge actionable. These include monitoring risk conditions, changing or reinforcing existing lifestyle practices, engaging in trial-and-error experimentation or postponing action whilst awaiting more advanced knowledge. The article furthermore outlines the relational dilemmas experienced by the informants as a type of consequence of taking DTC GTs. Overall, the article shows the various ways that a highly knowledge-oriented user group navigates DTC test results by relying on an 'epigenetic imaginary' that reframes genetic risk as open to intervention, but also how it struggles to close the gap between test results and the health-optimising actions that are so central for biohacking practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70237"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13367029/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148437710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Emerich Daroya, Martin French, Colin Hastings, Andrea Krüsi, Stephen Molldrem, Maureen Owino, Ryan Peck, Amy Wah, Alexander McClelland
{"title":"'It's Primarily Around Their Viral Load': Public Health Decision-Making and HIV Risk Assemblages in Ontario, Canada.","authors":"Emerich Daroya, Martin French, Colin Hastings, Andrea Krüsi, Stephen Molldrem, Maureen Owino, Ryan Peck, Amy Wah, Alexander McClelland","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70220","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70220","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>In Ontario, Canada, public health authorities can issue and enforce orders to people living with HIV (PLWH). However, how public health practitioners determine when someone's behaviours constitute 'significant' risk remains underexplored. We drew on assemblage theory to examine how HIV risk is co-constituted through the interplay among biomedical technologies, institutional practices, legal frameworks and social discourses. We conducted 18 semi-structured interviews with public health personnel and used reflexive thematic analysis. Five interrelated themes emerged. First, high viral load was considered a potential risk indicator when associated with high-risk activities. Second, discontinuity in HIV care may flag individuals for intervention. Third, co-infection with sexually transmissible and blood-borne infections (STBBI) triggered a viral load review to assess HIV exposure potential. Fourth, noncompliance with public health directives positioned PLWH as needing management. Fifth, Undetectable = Untransmittable (U = U) discourses have reconfigured and neutralised risk, functioning as a technology of reflexive governance. However, uptake of U = U was described as uneven across Ontario's public health units, leading to variable, and sometimes coercive, approaches. By conceptualising HIV risk as emergent, this study challenges individualised notions of responsibility and highlights the relational production of risk. Adoption of U = U and equity-based public health practices is needed to ensure nonpunitive HIV responses.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70220"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13287548/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148303003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Negotiation of Sleepwalking in the Age of Algorithms: Agency, Interpretation and Everyday Adaptations.","authors":"Svenja Reinhardt, Nico Wettmann","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70238","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70238","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Digital technologies, including sleep-tracking devices and smart mattresses, are becoming increasingly prevalent for gaining certainty and insight into unconscious behaviours such as sleepwalking. Sleepwalking, also known as somnambulism, is difficult to diagnose because it is episodic and unpredictable. Drawing on ethnographic research in sleep medical facilities and online communities focused on sleep tracking, this study examines how algorithmic systems shape our understanding of sleepwalking and our approaches to living with it. The results reveal three key dynamics: the negotiation of algorithmic authority, the limitations of measuring and categorising sleepwalking and the importance of integrating algorithmic data with personal experience. Our findings show that algorithmic systems do not simply detect sleepwalking; rather, the relationship between sociotechnical processes, clinical routines and knowledge, self-tracking practices and user interpretations constitutes it. Thus, sleepwalking can only be understood through the negotiation of data, narratives and embodied experiences, which reveals the limitations of standardised algorithmic measurement and the necessity of integrating diverse epistemic resources. These findings make a valuable contribution to sociological theory by shedding light on the relationship between human action and algorithmic influence in healthcare.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70238"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13371143/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148448912","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Suicide Prevention Under Austerity: The Local Shaping of Referral Practices in French Primary Care.","authors":"Baptiste Brossard, Ivan Garrec","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70223","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70223","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines how French general practitioners (GPs) navigate suicide-related referrals within a healthcare system strained by austerity. Drawing on repeated interviews with 29 GPs and a mind-mapping methodology, it shows that referral practices are shaped less by formal clinical pathways than by local resource configurations and the workarounds practitioners develop in response to them. The analysis highlights three interrelated dynamics. First, GPs rely on a sense of technical mastery-an embodied, experience-based judgement of what they can manage-which is continually stretched as they assume responsibilities once assigned to specialists. Second, they operate with expectations inherited from a previously better-resourced institutional network, generating tensions between normative ideals of care and limited referral possibilities. Third, in this context, local social capital becomes an essential resource: Personal relationships, informal networks and accumulated local knowledge decisively structure how practitioners deal with patients deemed suicidal. Situating these dynamics within the concept of suicidescape, this article advances a locally anchored sociology of suicide prevention.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70223"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148302959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pharmacological Practices Among Chilean University Students: Between Emotional Mediations, Performance Demands, and Health Mandates.","authors":"Angela Cifuentes, Juan Pablo Pinto","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70239","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70239","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This article examines the increasing use of psychotropic drugs among university students in Chile within a neoliberal academic context structured by performance demands, meritocratic imperatives and individualised forms of health management. Drawing on a qualitative analysis of 44 interviews conducted across three Chilean universities-two elite traditional institutions and one mass private university-we focus on 14 interviews in which psychotropic drug use emerged as a significant dimension of students' everyday lives. We conceptualise pharmacological practices as situated sociomaterial arrangements through which students regulate affect, sustain academic functionality and negotiate the demands of neoliberal university life. Within broader moral frameworks of healthism, three overlapping modalities emerge from our material: emotional mediations and performance-oriented use; medicated communities; and the body as interface. Together, these modalities reveal how psychotropic drugs reorganise the timing and intensity of distress, enabling forms of affective continuity and emotional self-regulation under conditions of accelerated academic life. Rather than constituting merely risk behaviours or cognitive enhancement practices, pharmacological practices emerge as technologies of affective and bodily adaptation embedded within Chile's neoliberal university system, where academic continuity frequently depends on the individualised management of distress structurally produced by the institution itself.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 6","pages":"e70239"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13371154/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148448861","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"'I Put a Lot of Emotion in My Work, I Use It, It's My Tool': An Ethnographic Account of Algorithmic Homecare Assistance in the Netherlands.","authors":"Eliana Bergamin, Iris Wallenburg","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70211","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70211","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>This paper explores how the introduction of AI-powered remote technologies reconfigures emotional practices in homecare. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with a Dutch company that replaces in-house nurses with remote monitoring systems and nonmedically trained 'coaches', the authors analyse the introduction of so-called 'empathy sessions': 15-minute per week (online) calls aimed at making up for the emotional void left by reduced or removed in-person nursing. These sessions transform this nursing intervention into a new, technically mediated format that creates new professional roles, alters the training of both nurses and coaches and reshapes how homecare clients engage with care providers. We argue that the company's emphasis on efficiency as a guiding value plays a central role in shaping how these emotional practices are understood and enacted: empathy is condensed into time-limited sessions, reassigned from nurses to newly created roles (coaches) and moved to technologically mediated exchanges. Beyond this reshaping, the study also shows the ambiguities involved and raises questions about how care is allocated, who gets to perform it and how its delivery is shaped by entrepreneurial frameworks of efficiency and market-oriented healthcare delivery.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 5","pages":"e70211"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13270346/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148259475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Prediction to Horizon: Clinicians' Negotiations of AI-Driven Personal Prognoses in Clinical Practice.","authors":"Iben Mundbjerg Gjødsbøl, Mette Nordahl Svendsen","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70209","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70209","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Computational methods and tools under the label 'artificial intelligence' (AI) are increasingly promoted as solutions to the challenges of under-resourced and understaffed healthcare systems, with predictive modelling positioned as a means to improve efficiency and individualise care. Yet little is known about how predictive algorithms are taken up in the everyday practices of clinical decision-making. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with Danish cardiologists working with the CARDIA<sup>IHD</sup> algorithm, this article examines how AI-driven personal prognoses intersect with clinical reasoning and organisational temporalities. We show, first, that complex algorithms introduce new forms of interpretive work; second, that their mathematical non-linear reasoning often conflicts with clinicians' causal and chronological frameworks; and third, that actionable horizons do not simply emerge with a survival prognosis but must be situated within specific times, places and organisational demands. Conceptualising prognostication with AI as horizoning, we argue that algorithmic personal prognoses do not straightforwardly deliver actionable futures, but must be anchored within the temporal and organisational conditions of clinical work to guide decision-making. Our findings advance sociological debates on the future by demonstrating that in algorithmically informed healthcare, the future is not a pre-given horizon but a negotiated, relational and socially enacted terrain.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 5","pages":"e70209"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC13270078/pdf/","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148259477","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"From Abruption to Chronicity: Temporalities of Long-Term HIV Survival in Norway.","authors":"Tony Sandset","doi":"10.1111/1467-9566.70222","DOIUrl":"10.1111/1467-9566.70222","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Since the mid-1990s, combination antiretroviral therapy (ART) has transformed HIV from a fatal diagnosis into a manageable long-term condition. For the first time, a large cohort of people who once expected to die young are now growing old with HIV. This article examines how long-term survivors narrate and make sense of a life shaped by two linked turning points: First, a diagnosis that was widely understood as a death sentence; and second, the arrival of effective treatment, which abruptly reopened a future that had been foreclosed. Drawing on life-history interviews with 21 people living with HIV aged 50 and older in Norway the article shows that diagnosis was experienced as a terminal rupture that cancelled plans, relationships, and long-term commitments. The subsequent stabilisation of effective therapy did not simply restore what had been lost; it introduced a second upheaval, compelling participants to rebuild a life they had not expected to live. I propose the concept of prognostic horizon reversal to name this therapy-driven shift in expected life horizons and to clarify how it reshapes biography, responsibility and the practical work of planning for a future under conditions of ongoing treatment, clinical monitoring and the lingering traces of earlier crisis.</p>","PeriodicalId":21685,"journal":{"name":"Sociology of health & illness","volume":"48 5","pages":"e70222"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2026-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148278612","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"医学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}