The global healthcare landscape faces mounting challenges, from resource constraints and rural healthcare access in Uzbekistan, to aging populations and rising chronic disease rates in Europe. Amidst these, the digital transformation in healthcare and the study of international legal aspects governing telemedicine services have emerged as crucial priorities. This article examines the international legal framework for telemedicine, analyzing key documents of the United Nations (UN), World Health Organization (WHO), International Telecommunication Union (ITU), and various regional bodies. It highlights the absence of a universal agreement that comprehensively addresses telemedicine regulation and data protection issues. The article explores national regulatory efforts and identifies gaps in the current fragmented approach. Recommendations include establishing a dedicated subsidiary body under the UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (CESCR) to oversee telemedicine-related matters and codifying scattered norms into a coherent framework. Strengthening the international legal basis for telemedicine can help expand access to vital healthcare services and improve global health outcomes.

As Western society becomes increasingly digitally dependent and many older adults actively engage in the online world, understanding the experiences of those who largely do not use digital technology in their daily lives is crucial. Individual interviews were conducted (pre-pandemic) with 23 older adults who, based on self-identification, did not regularly use digital technology, exploring how their experiences as limited digital technology users may have impacted their daily lives. An iterative collaborative qualitative analysis demonstrated three main themes: internet concerns, frustrations with digital technology, and conflicting motivators to use digital technology. Findings suggest that addressing digital concerns and providing effective digital skill learning opportunities may encourage some older adults to become more digitally engaged. However, as people, including older adults, can be uninterested in using these technologies, organizations and institutions should work to offer ways to support people of all ages who are not engaged online.

Researchers across outdoor and environmental education (OEE) are drawing on relational ontologies to break down dualisms, human-centric thinking and challenge neoliberal education that focusses on outcomes and achievements. Digital technology has been seen as problematic in OEE because of its distracting qualities within notions of authentic outdoor experiences. Re-conceptualising digital technology as something learners are entangled with — rejecting a dualistic position — offers a nuanced way of understanding how digital technology could be harnessed for OEE. This research presents speculative findings from a new materialist inspired project on how teachers considered video-making and the more-than-human in OEE. Working with assemblage theory and attention to affect, we portray ways assemblages of video-making and the more-than-human can shape OEE in new ways. Implications for educators in how they might assemble OEE with technology are suggested.

Recent studies highlight the need for ethical and equitable digital health research that protects the rights and interests of racialized communities. We argue for practices in digital health that promote data self-determination for these communities, especially in data collection and management. We suggest that researchers partner with racialized communities to curate data that reflects their wellness understandings and health priorities, and respects their consent over data use for policy and other outcomes. These data governance approach honors and builds on Indigenous Data Sovereignty (IDS) decolonial scholarship by Indigenous and non-indigenous researchers and its adaptations to health research involving racialized communities from former European colonies in the global South. We discuss strategies to practice equity, diversity, inclusion, accessibility and decolonization (EDIAD) principles in digital health. We draw upon and adapt the concept of Precision Health Equity (PHE) to emphasize models of data sharing that are co-defined by racialized communities and researchers, and stress their shared governance and stewardship of data that is generated from digital health research. This paper contributes to an emerging research on equity issues in digital health and reducing health, institutional, and technological disparities. It also promotes the self-determination of racialized peoples through ethical data management.

Consistent with the idea that business ethics is a form of applied ethics, many virtue ethicists make use of an extant (pure) moral philosophy framework, namely, one developed by Alasdair MacIntyre. In doing so, these authors have refined MacIntyre’s work, but have never really challenged it. In here questioning, and developing an alternative to, the MacIntyrean orthdoxy, I illustrate the merit of business ethicists adopting a broader philosophical perspective focused on constructing (new) theory. More specifically—and in referring to action sports (e.g., mountain biking, snowboarding)—I propose that an external good motive is not only much more consistent with virtuous practical excellence than MacIntyreans acknowledge, but that such a motive is fundamental to identifying and explaining how practices can be deliberately created (by businesses). Consequently, and in stark contrast with MacIntyre’s deeply pessimistic outlook on modern business and society, I propose that those who value practices might celebrate our current era.

Previous literature suggests that the gig economy and platform work pose challenges to social policy, including the welfare entitlement issues caused by workers’ ambiguous occupational status. Focusing on the government’s regulatory role, this study investigates platform workers’ occupational welfare (OW) by conducting in-depth interviews with forty-six food delivery workers in Hong Kong. The evidence reveals workers’ occupational risks resulting from platforms’ algorithmic devices and the misclassification of independent contractors. The denied access to private occupational pensions was considered acceptable by workers because of the perceived irrelevance of OW. While interviewees emphasised time-based flexibility as a key intangible benefit, the shifting business costs to self-employed workers was highlighted as a disadvantage. A policy dilemma appears between strengthening state regulation/protection and maintaining workers’ temporal autonomy. Arguably, the platformisation of work is translated into the gigification of OW, disentitling platform workers’ employer-provided welfare and labour protection. Platforms possess monopolising power over workers, the state displays weak regulatory power to monitor platforms, and workers’ occupational citizenship is undermined by the government’s minimal intervention. This study contributes to the literature by linking OW to platform work and revealing how the gig economy reshapes social policy, empirically offering a worker-centred analysis of OW in Hong Kong.

Autobiographical memories show a temporal pattern with relatively many events recalled from the recent past (recency) and from adolescence to early adulthood (reminiscence bump), and very few events recalled from the first few years of life (childhood amnesia). The current study examined a temporal pattern for external memory – information stored outside of one's brain. Three survey studies asked participants to choose which age(s) in their life they would most want to keep photos from, supposing they had many photos from every year. Participants chose 1 year of photos in Study 1, which sampled undergraduates (N = 499, median age = 19), and in Study 2, which sampled online participants using stratified age brackets (N = 252, age range 18–82). Participants chose 3 years of photos in Study 3, which sampled online participants over 40 using stratified age brackets (N = 240, age range 40–93). Participants’ choices largely showed preferences for time periods likely to be well remembered (recency and the reminiscence bump). Qualitative coding of participants’ reasons for their choices showed common themes, such as positive emotions, connections to other people and pets, life milestones, personal growth, and school. Results suggest that in the case of photos, external memory served to mostly enhance or enrich internal memory and less often to compensate for internal memory.

This article contends that Christ’s eucharistic offer of friendship, and the habits of attentiveness such real presence demands, must shape the church’s mission in a digital milieu that tends to shallow attention and relationships. It makes this argument in dialogue principally with the theology of Bernard Lonergan and the pontificate of Pope Francis, while aided by the cultural commentary of Nicholas Carr, Sherry Turkle, and Marshall McLuhan. First, I consider how Lonergan’s focus on human knowing and choosing anticipates the recent turn in the Catholic magisterium under Pope Francis that considers the formative effects of digital communication technologies. Second, I show how Lonergan’s account of bias helps explain the shallowing effects of these technologies, for both cognition and community. Third, inspired by Lonergan and Pope Francis, I propose how practices of friendship—informed by Christ’s own friendship extended through Eucharistic presence—can foster habits of real presence able to counter the shallows of our digital age.

The current development in the field of artificial intelligence and its applications has advantages and disadvantages in the digital age that we now live in. The state of the use of AI for mental health has to be assessed by stakeholders, which includes all of us. We must comprehend the trends, gaps, opportunities, challenges, and shortcomings of this new technology. As the field evolves, rules, regulatory frameworks, guidelines, standards, and policies will develop and will progressively scale upwards. To advance the field, mental health professionals must be prepared to meet obstacles and seize possibilities presented by creative and disruptive technologies like AI. Therefore, a collaborative strategy must include multi-stakeholder participation in basic, translational, and clinical aspects of AI. Mental health practitioners need to be ready to face challenges and embrace and harness the power of innovative and disruptive technology such as AI that could offer to move the field forward.

This paper rereads the tort of intrusion upon seclusion, as it was adopted by the Ontario Court of Appeal in Jones v Tsige, to include a fuller account of online privacy. It proposes that the Court’s stress on informational privacy forfeits a more dynamic and “spatialized” conception of privacy harm. This paper develops a relational account of spatial privacy using the work of Iris Marion Young, Virginia Woolf, and Jennifer Nedelsky based on three features—embodied habits, narrative, and experimentation—to supplement the informational reading of privacy in Jones. While Jones is not a case about young people, this paper nonetheless takes the Court’s emphasis on digital technology as an invitation to reflect on young people’s privacy. Using different accounts of young people’s online experience, it proposes that while privacy is certainly transformed by the online world, its basic spatial features have not changed as dramatically as the Court in Jones suggests.