![]() He guided the teams through assembling their own oximeter. Zeroing in on a case study concerning a different health material, device, or technology, each session probes what Moran-Thomas refers to as "the social assumptions that get built into objects meant to improve health."įor the week's focus on "Politics of Measurement," students rolled up their sleeves for the lab portion of class, joined by Jose Gomez-Marquez of MakerHealth. She developed the class in 2019 to encourage students to learn from ethnographic approaches, the MIT Program in Science, Technology and Society, and history to explore social inquiries related to health objects. Moran-Thomas observed that anthropology's key frameworks for studying material culture were often missing from spaces of device design and pre-med coursework. This was just one meeting from MIT class 21A.311 (The Social Lives of Medical Objects), a course taught by Amy Moran-Thomas, associate professor of anthropology and the 2022 winner of the Edgerton Faculty Achievement Award. They were building basic pulse oximeters from low-cost do-it-yourself (DIY) kits of assorted wirelings from Tin圜ircuits. ![]() This spring, surrounded by antique telescope models in a classroom tucked inside the MIT Museum, 10 students bent over a square-shaped seminar table. At the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when many hospitals ran out of beds and ventilators, the fingertip pulse oximeter - a $20 neighborhood drugstore purchase - became a primary arbiter of whether a patient was "sick enough" to gain admission to an emergency room.
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