Foto: AAPH

Research

From Innovations to users (and back)

Global health technologies, such as vaccines, diagnostic tools and antibiotics, have shaped the last century of medical advances, leading to globally increased life expectancy and crucial improvements in quality of life. Technologies continue to develop at breath-taking speed and redraw the boundaries between life and death.

However, in practice many technological advances cannot unfold their full potential due to limitations in availability and uptake. Technologies are embedded in a dense web of legal, ethical, infrastructural and societal requirements meant to ensure their utility and safe use.

The key challenge is to identify who or what can safeguard, guide and foster the use of (new) technologies when these are often only loosely embedded in commercial and regulatory forces of markets, governmental bodies and consumer attitudes.

Aim

We conceptualize user-technology relations in a finegrained manner, zooming in on the different stages of the life cycle of technological innovations in order to portray and compare various forms of user-involvements and user-requirements in the global health context. Putting users - end users, regulatory, governmental, commercial - center stage will allow to close the gap between the (imagined) potentials of novel technologies and the particularities of different contexts of use.

Overarching Research Questions

1
What key factors influence how new technologies are adopted and adapted in settings with limited resources?
2
To what extent does the development and uptake of new technologies depend on a clear understanding of local user needs and practices?
3
Through what kinds of interactions and mechanisms do relationships between users and technologies take shape in environments with minimal regulatory oversight?
4
How can transdisciplinary approaches help navigate and reconcile different expectations and visions for how health technologies should be used?

Case Studies Along the Technology Life Cycle

The conceptual structure focuses on the technology life-cycle, consisting of research & development (R&D), prototyping and implementation. In order to better understand users and their impact on the transferability of health technologies into new contexts for each of these building blocks, we have assembled a large, interdisciplinary team of academics. Together, we undertake three inter-and transdisciplinary, multi-sited case studies within the themes of mental health, anti-microbial resistance (AMR) and vaccinology.

Building Ethical Health Technologies through Equitable Collaboration

Ethics

Reconstruction of implicit normative orientations within the research program.

Prof. Torsten Meireis, Dr. Jakob Langen (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Germany)

Cross-Cutting Research Questions

How do normative assumptions embedded in global health technologies affect their acceptance and use in postcolonial contexts?
How do differing personal, disciplinary, or cultural motivations among researchers influence the design, direction, and ethical framing of global health technology research?
How can we understand and make visible varying (normative) assumptions and expectations of researchers and local stakeholders in processes of transdisciplinary interactions?

Equitable Partnerships

Monitoring and evaluating research partnerships through institutional process research and workshop sessions tailored to the progress and lived experience of the Case Studies throughout the research lifecycle

Prof. Beate Kampmann, Luisa Wagenschwanz (Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Germany)

Research Questions

How do the respective partners conceptualize and define a “good” or equitable partnership within the collaboration?
What structural and institutional factors facilitate or constrain the development of equitable partnerships?
How are ethical principles operationalized and enacted in practice throughout the research process?
How are data ownership, access, and governance negotiated among partners, and what rationales underpin these arrangements?
How does the partnership evolve over the course of the research lifecycle?
What frameworks and criteria can be developed and used to monitor and evaluate the partnership itself?