Beza Merid

Professor Beza Merid is a scholar of digital health and social medicine, and his research examines the social, cultural, and political dimensions of illness as well as the pursuit of innovation in biomedicine. He is interested in understanding the role that technology plays in how patients manage their illness experiences. To examine this role, he looks to sites of inquiry that include the design, availability, and use of digital health technologies like wearable devices to track blood pressure; the role these technologies play in patients’ capacity to optimize their lives and minimize their disease risks; the forms of community and belonging—as well as potential harms and limitations—that using these technologies can enable; the power relations that shape the design and use of these technologies, with particular attention to how these technologies may promote an individual responsibility for health that undermines a more collectivized approach to promoting health; and the potential to imagine, build, and deploy digital health technologies that enable radical and alternative health futures that center values like justice and equity.

This body of research offers important insights into the values that shape digital health technology design and use, as well as a critical perspective necessary for building a more just future for patients who use digital technologies to manage their health. As the ongoing coronavirus pandemic shows us, virtual modalities for health care delivery are critical to our ability to provide care for all who need it. Understanding how the technologies we use and the health care and health insurance systems in which they are deployed enable or inhibit this delivery of care is also vital to the work of addressing persistent inequities.