The Horizon 2020 project Smart4Health aims at developing, testing and validating a health data platform prototype, enabling  EU Citizens to be active participants in managing their own health. The key objective of Smart4Health is to place the citizen in the centre of decisions with regard to their own healthcare by enabling the possibility of sharing health data with different clinicians, medical centers, local and international societies, for research activities as well as to engage directly with healthcare providers.
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The vision and key objective of ICU4Covid is to deliver intensive care medicine fit for the fight against COVID-19 to the EU citizen and the health workforce rapidly and at scale by clinically validating and deploying the Cyber-Physical-system for Tele- and Intensive Care Medicine (CPS4TIC). The CPS4TIC consists of a telemedicine cockpit, telemedicine consoles at each peripheral hospital, a connector platform and smart bedside hubs including robotic arm at the bedsides of both, the central telemonitoring clinics and the peripheral telemonitored hospitals.
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In the project ‘Making Europe through and for its research infrastructures’ (METAFORIS), a collaboration between the STS department of the University of Vienna and the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) at TU Munich we comparatively explore how European integration and European science have co-produced each other. We do this by looking at four eminent Transnational European Research Infrastructures (TERIs) in different scientific fields, established at different moments in time. We study the Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (CERN; established in 1954), the European Space Agency (ESA; 1975), Laserlab Europe (LLE; 2001), and Biobanking and BioMolecular Research Infrastructure (BBMRI; 2008). We aim to analyze how each infrastructure embodied a distinct vision for European integration, and how, conversely, these research infrastructures were powerful vehicles to advance integration. We will thus explore how changing imaginations of Europe since World War II affected the foundation, the institutional forms and societal positioning of TERIs.
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The project will investigate how under the changing conditions in research and innovation issues of respecting good scientific practice come up and how they are dealt with. In doing so it focuses on a specific institutional, epistemic and local context, i.e. an Austrian University and the field of life sciences/biomedicine, while looking at it through the lens of international debates. The project will not start from a fixed normative definition of good scientific practice (GSP), but much rather follow the notion through researchers’ narratives, institutional structures and wider societal narratives.
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Over the past decade Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) Technologies have entered our work and life environments in a wide range of production and distribution contexts, ranging from car production chains, over electronic toll collection systems to fashion industry. Using tags as carriers of information, they are meant to help to automatically identify and track objects within and across sites. What sounds like a real technological advancement for realizing better automated production processes or of easy control of objects and stocks, it also poses a number of challenges when it comes to asking questions concerning ethical and societal aspects related to such realizations. To investigate these latter aspects during the development of a specific RFID tracking technology is the main aim of the “RFID & Society” project.
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In recent years, “diversity” has become a buzzword within medical practice, research and health policy. Contrary to the prior assumption that human bodies are essentially similar and an associated focus on standardized patients, the view that people have different dispositions and needs regarding health has gained prominence. Age, gender, education, socio-economic status and ethnic and cultural background all seem to make a difference in relation to health risk, health behavior and the use of medical services. Medical practice and research are increasingly called upon to take these differences into account, and to develop ethnically, culturally and gender sensitive approaches.
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The new research field nanotechnology has entered the public arena against the background of debates about the relation of science, technology and society (as for instance those over genetically modified organisms). Since their first appearance, nanotechnologies are closely interwoven with cultural narrations of utopian and dystopian social imaginations. Therefore, nanotechnologies are of special interest for the analysis of the changing relations of science and society. Moreover, “nano” as so-called “enabling technology” links a variety of disciplines and potential fields of application and is thus confronted with different technoscientific and social framings.
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During the last years the term transdisciplinarity – which is not older than 20 years – is hyped by funding agencies, politicians and university managers who share the opinion of transdisciplinary research as appropriate way to handle complex questions. It is claimed that science therefore has to transcend a certain disciplinary reduction and to integrate various kinds of knowledge and experiences (including extra-scientific knowledge) in order to frame both the definition of a problem and possible solutions according to the particular context. That contains an array of different expectations and demands for both research and non-scientific forms of knowledge production, which challenge all participants.
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In recent years, obesity as a public health problem has acquired increasing prominence both on the policy agenda and in public discourse. In these discussions, obesity is predominantly framed as a societal problem requiring urgent action, as the term “global epidemic” coined by the World Health Organization in 2004 amply suggests. Also the EU’s public health program addresses “the obesity problem” by focusing on nutrition and physical activity. The first Austrian Adipositas report published in 2006 joins the choir urging to act. Increasing advertisements for new medication and a growing number of public events to address and educate citizens to look after their bodies are the most recent developments as yet.
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“Science under attack” titles a 2006 Nature editorial describing how political context is intruding the core of scientific activities. “In today’s scientific labour market, just doing good science is no longer enough” underlined Science a year earlier, hinting at the difficulties of scientific careers today. And in 2003 the executive officer of American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) stressed the importance of addressing “not only the inherent benefits, but also the limits, perils and pitfalls” of science. He points to the importance of more openly addressing the realities of scientific research and its impacts on society. These are but three examples showing that the scientific community is increasingly aware of the co-evolution of science and society, altering not only the ways in which knowledge is produced and disseminated, but also potentially affecting the knowledge itself.
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Over the past decades information and communication technologies have gradually entered public and private spheres, restructuring them through new qualitative and quantitative possibilities of access to information as well as of exchange and interaction. In the medical field these changes seem to be especially relevant. Last but not least health information is among those topics people most often search for on the Internet.
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Building on scholarship in feminist philosophy and social studies of science, the project will examine the role of gender in the production of knowledge contexts and cultures in an East-West perspective in two scientific fields (sociology and biology). While critiques of science and situated conceptions of knowledge have been developed in western Euro-American contexts, traditional assumptions of knowledge production were largely unexamined in the former state-socialist countries. The absence of local examinations of knowledge contexts currently jeopardises effective implementation of gender equality in the ERA.
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