Towards sensory studies of digital health

My call for papers for the special issue invited contributions from a socio cultural perspective that address the entanglements of human senses with digital sensors in the portrayal, conceptualisation and use of digital health technologies. A major impetus for this special issue was my growing awareness that representations of digital health paradoxically often leave out the flesh-and-blood, visceralities and sensory experiences of bodies. Digital health technologies are all about bodies: monitoring, measuring, visualising and treating various bodily states and experiences. Yet public discourses on digital health and expert portrayals in the medical and public health literature tend to take a curiously dispassionate and disembodied perspective. And in some ways, digital technologies tend to engage with human bodies in ways that reduce their fleshly attributes to flat, two-dimensional images that privilege the visual over other sensory responses