BRIDGING THE MATERIAL, SOCIAL, AND PSYCHOLOGICAL WORLD BY EXPLORING THE TRANSFORMATIVE POTENTIAL OF SMART PRODUCTS IN HEALTHCARE SERVICE SYSTEMS

Today, actors in healthcare service systems - like patients, healthcare providers and technology developers - are experimenting with smart products (i.e. physical products enhanced by digital components) to deliver better services. Despite their potential to improve service quality, research on the way in which smart products (material world) affect the social practices [i.e. routine patterns of action (social world)] and well-being [i.e. optimal psychological condition] of human actors (psychological world) in healthcare service systems is still in its infancy. Hence, my research bridges material, social, and psychological worlds to explore the transformative potential of smart products (i.e. extent to which the well-being of different human actors in service systems is enhanced). By means of an ethnographic study, a comparative case study and a field experiment in collaboration with smart product developers and healthcare organizations from my network, my postdoctoral research aims to study respectively: (1) how well-being and social practices shape the design and implementation of smart products in healthcare systems, (2) how the type of smart product affect its transformative potential, and (3) how the implications of the type of smart products for different healthcare systems actors’ social practices and well-being evolve over time. These insights facilitate the implementation and design of smart products so that different human actors’ well-being is enhanced over time.