Surveillance, Discipline and Care

Abstract

Concerns about medical non-compliance have generated interest in the potential of remote, digital reminder and surveillance technologies. Amidst a devastating HIV/AIDS epidemic and outbreaks of drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB), compliance technologies are touted by developers and medical researchers as a solution to the ‘problem of non-compliance’. The appeal lies in the prospect of fashioning disciplined bodies, but at the cost of sacrificing the intimacy of care for technical expediency. Despite the growing popularity in global medicine to account for disease in terms of the ‘social determinants of health’, digital medical technologies reproduce discourses of health as an individual responsibility. I conducted research in a TB clinic in South Africa that experimented with an electronic reminder and monitoring device that sought to improve compliance to a new regimen of drugs for TB prevention. I found that patients embraced the apparatus through local framings of TB, and deployed it in their everyday struggles for care.