Bringing Attention to the Growing Social Impact of Biomedical Devices
Citation: K. Schmitt, P. R. Berger and K. Michael, "Bringing Attention to the Growing Social Impact of Biomedical Devices," in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, vol. 45, no. 3, pp. 6-10, Sept. 2026, doi: 10.1109/MTS.2026.3717156.
Photo by Pavel Danilyuk
Every year, IEEE convenes its journal, magazine, and newsletter editors to a meeting, titled the IEEE Panel of Editors (PoE). In 2024, the IEEE PoE was held in San Diego, CA, USA. Attending this annual meeting is a high point of serving as an editor-in-chief (EiC) for IEEE. Each year, as EiCs, we meet and discuss the state of the art in peer review and publication. It also gives IEEE EiCs a chance to connect across disciplines and societies. These networking opportunities are an advantage for any editor, but for those of us who are affiliated with the highly interdisciplinary IEEE Society for the Social Implications of Technology (SSIT), connecting with editors across a wide range of fields and perspectives is especially exciting.
The 2024 PoE meeting allowed the three authors of this article to meet: Paul Berger, the founding EiC for IEEE Journal on Flexible Electronics (J-FLEX), by serendipity sat at a lunch table with Katina Michael, the founding EiC of IEEE Transactions on Technology and Society (TTS), and Ketra Schmitt, the EiC of IEEE Technology and Society Magazine (MTS), who were also meeting for the first time in person at the 2024 PoE. At that lunch, after Paul discovered the depth and breadth of the IEEE SSIT ecosystem, he proposed the idea of cooperation, which quickly led to a three-way discussion leading to a triple special issue – between IEEE J-FLEX, IEEE TTS and IEEE MTS, in collaboration with IEEE Brain, where Paul Berger also sat on the Steering Committee and chairs their Publication Committee. Collectively, we see the incredible promise of flexible electronic applications, particularly when aimed at healthy bodies and brains toward prevention of chronic illness. It was also clear to us that these applications have urgent and potentially serious social, legal, and ethical implications. These implications include traditional privacy and data governance issues, and other emerging risks—such as those pertaining to the sustainability of privately owned biomedical companies serving various communities of interest that may enter insolvency or bankruptcy and may no longer be able to maintain current supply or applicable updates/upgrades to their customers.
Gap Instead of a Special Issue
In July 2026, we published the penultimate special issue in IEEEJ-FLEX, along with an editorial titled: “Social Impact of the Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): From Body Wearables to Brain Implants.” The submitted papers offer a unique outlook on the state-of-the-art medical technology applications of flexible electronics. The focus and topic of the selected papers found in this issue highlighted a gap in IoMT. We encourage readers to peruse this issue [1]. While we were unable to satisfy our hope of an unprecedented IEEE triple-special issue, we feel we were able to raise awareness among the technical biomedical and corresponding social implications communities. We received a handful of papers that did not meet reviewer expectations, and thus, we decided to write a brief editorial instead.
Our initial goal for the triple-special issue was to highlight scholarship on the social, legal, and ethical impacts of wearable and implantable biomedical technologies, along with critical scholarship on the ways they are adopted, designed, implemented, and maintained, and how those practices might be mediated by access issues due to socioeconomic factors, or use barriers related to insurance or local technology environments. Ideally, a special issue in IEEE MTS might have included an exploration of how IoMT is socially shaped, or how hacker culture and do-it-yourself (DIY) efforts could result in workable personal healthcare technologies, and how implementation open access issues might be overcome, whether those are related to regulation, control of intellectual property, or systems complexity.
For IEEE TTS, papers in such a special issue might have advanced theoretical frameworks that reposition patients as active agents rather than passive data sources within IoMT ecosystems, drawing on science and technology studies (STS) and human–computer interaction (HCl) to interrogate power asymmetries between patients, clinicians, device manufacturers, and platform providers. Methodologically, contributions could have ranged from participatory action research and co-design workshops with patients and caregivers, to longitudinal ethnographies of how connected medical devices are actually used, adapted, or resisted in everyday life, surfacing gaps between designed intent and lived practice. On design, articles might have proposed novel interaction paradigms and interface architectures that give patients meaningful, granular control over what data is collected, shared, and with whom, moving beyond binary consent models toward more dynamic, contextual permissioning systems.
We had especially been looking forward to receiving papers on socio-technical futures, using speculative design, scenario planning, or Delphi studies to explore how IoMT infrastructures might reshape care relationships, institutional trust, and health equity over the next decade, while others might have mapped the broader socio-technical ecosystem, tracing how regulatory bodies, insurers, interoperability standards, and cybersecurity requirements jointly shape what is technically and legally possible. Finally, a cluster of contributions could have addressed regulatory matters directly, examining how existing frameworks like the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), or the European Union Medical Device Regulation (EU MDR) have failed to anticipate the continuous, ambient data flows characteristic of IoMT. We hoped these contributions would have proposed governance models better suited to patient-centric control and accountability across distributed device networks.
Field with a Long History of Attention
The few submissions that we received were important for the future of the biotechnology industry at large, bridging gaps between patients, carers, biomedical engineers, and surgeons through differing methodological approaches. But we were unable to attract enough or sufficient articles that proactively anticipated and addressed the potential risks, governance requirements, and societal implications of these technologies—work that is imperative to these technologies’ successful implementation and to ensuring they achieve their intended purposes of advancing human wellbeing. These questions lie at the heart of technology and society scholarship and have long been part of the mission of the IEEE SSIT and its publications. We searched the titles and abstracts of IEEE MTS and IEEE TTS papers for fuzzy matches to the terms “wearables,” “brain implants,” “brain pacemakers,” “cyborgs,” “nanotechnology,” “heart pacemaker,” “pacemaker,” and “implants,” yielding 56 relevant papers. Notably, IEEE TTS has not published a single paper in this space to date—a gap we specifically call to be addressed. A comprehensive bibliography appears in the supplemental References section (i.e., digital media file). We highlight a few example papers here by IEEE SSIT authors.
IEEE SSIT has published articles on implants, wearables, brain implants, DBS devices, and more. In addition, IEEE MTS has collaborated with the IEEE Consumer Technology Society (CTSoc) to bring attention to this field of study with an inter/transdisciplinary emphasis. For instance, there was a special issue in IEEE MTS on “brain implants in the military” [2] in 2017. There were interviews with patients published in IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine[3], [4] with respect to patient feedback and product lifecycle management of consumer medical electronics between 2018 and 2021. IEEE SSIT’s annual International Symposium in Technology and Society (ISTAS) over 20 years has consistently published in its conference proceedings papers on biomedical devices and social implications and impacts. IEEE SSIT-affiliated authors published a paper in the Proceedings of the IEEE in 2019 on engineering-design embedding ethics in autonomous robots (e.g., implantables) [5]. At the 21st Century Wiener conference, several papers over the years have focused on feedback loops of implantables [6], [7], [8], as Norbert Wiener himself had an interest in the brain as related to cybernetics [9].
IoMT as a Socio–Technical System
As IoMT evolves, from consumer wearables and ambient sensing technologies to implantable and autonomous medical devices, it is increasingly evident that these innovations should not be viewed merely as collections of connected artifacts, but as components of complex socio-technical systems. The design and evaluation of IoMT, therefore, demand methodologies that move beyond measures of technical performance, reliability, and clinical efficacy to examine how these technologies interact with human values, organizational practices, regulatory frameworks, economic incentives, and broader societal expectations. Such an approach recognizes that the impacts of IoMT are distributed across multiple stakeholders and unfold over time, producing both intended benefits and unintended consequences.
While IoMT has the potential to improve health outcomes, personalize care, and extend clinical capacity, it also raises fundamental questions regarding agency, autonomy, privacy, equity, accountability, trust, and the redistribution of responsibility. The challenge before researchers, practitioners, policymakers, and industry is, therefore, not simply to build smarter medical technologies, but to design socio-technical ecosystems that responsibly integrate these technologies into society.
Our collective aspiration should be to develop IoMT systems that meaningfully reduce the cognitive, physical, emotional, and administrative burden experienced by clinicians, patients, research participants, carers, families, social workers, insurers, regulators, and innovators alike, while advancing human well-being and flourishing. Achieving this objective requires interdisciplinary inquiry, multistakeholder engagement, and design methodologies that place societal values alongside technical excellence from the earliest stages of innovation through to deployment, governance, and ongoing adaptation. This is where the field is headed already, as we read critical and timely stories related to our special issue call, covered within the broader IEEE universe. IEEE Spectrum has a suite of articles that investigate the human use aspects of emerging technology solutions, particularly aimed at medical issues and access to technology. In a special report titled “Cyborg Tech” [10], IEEE Spectrum explored assistive technology scenarios. While this article on the user experience of recipients of brain chip implants is the closest to our special issue [11], other pieces explored the role that assistive technology users can have in co-designing and improving technologies [12], [13].
IEEE Spectrum has the power to highlight high-profile technological developments to over half a million member engineers and affiliates and millions of people who access their products and licenses through libraries around the world. And that is significant. Likewise, IEEE J-FLEX and IEEE Brain focus scholars on cutting-edge applications and technologies at the electronics brain interface. Here, we call on the technology and society community, members of SSIT, and readership of both IEEE MTS and IEEE TTS to help to fill the critical gap between technology innovation and successful, equitable implementation. We provide the call for papers of both IEEE MTS and IEEE TTS as supplementary digital materials and encourage researchers, practitioners, policy professionals, and others to consider trailblazing in these emergent areas of research and practice, as our future depends on cross-disciplinary collaboration. In future issues, we invite scholars from these communities to collaborate, and hopefully identify, encourage, and develop impactful projects at the intersections of our research areas. Perhaps in time, we can revisit and publish the ultimate cross-society joint special issue.
References
[1] Y. Liu, “Guest editorial special issue on the social impact of the Internet of Medical Things: From body wearables to brain implants,” IEEE J. Flexible Electron., vol. 5, no. 6, pp. 187–188, Jun. 2026, doi: 10.1109/JFLEX.2026.3704807.
[2] K. Michael, “Socio-ethical implications of implantable technologies in the military sector [guest editorial],” IEEE Technol. Soc. Mag., vol. 36, no. 1, pp. 7–9, Mar. 2017, doi: 10.1109/MTS.2017.2670219.
[3] K. Michael, “Brain pacemakers in consumer medical electronics improve quality of life—Part II: The need for patient feedback in the product lifecycle management,” IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag., vol. 7, no. 6, pp. 51–54, Nov. 2018, doi: 10.1109/MCE.2018.2835879.
[4] S. Hamdoun, “Assistive technologies for greatly improved quality of life for people living with MND/ALS,” IEEE Consum. Electron. Mag., vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 76–81, May 2021, doi: 10.1109/MCE.2020.3035523.
[5] L. J. Robertson, “Engineering-based design methodology for embedding ethics in autonomous robots,” Proc. IEEE, vol. 107, no. 3, pp. 582–599, Mar. 2019, doi: 10.1109/JPROC.2018.2889678.
[6] T. Bonaci, “Securing the exocortex: A twenty-first century cybernetics challenge,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Norbert Wiener 21st Century (21CW), Jun. 2014, pp. 1–8, doi: 10.1109/NORBERT.2014.6893912.
[7] C. Perakslis, “Perceived barriers for implanting microchips in humans: A transnational study,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Norbert Wiener 21st Century (21CW), Jun. 2014, pp. 1–8, doi: 10.1109/NORBERT.2014.6893929.
[8] K. Michael, “DARPA’s ADAPTER program: Applying the ELSI approach to a semi-autonomous complex sociotechnical system,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Norbert Wiener 21st Century (21CW), Chennai, India, Jul. 2021, pp. 1–10, doi: 10.1109/21CW48944.2021.9532581.
[9] R. J. Andrews, “The brain-machine interface: Nanotechnology and cybernetics 60 years after Norbert Wiener,” in Proc. IEEE Conf. Norbert Wiener 21st Century (21CW), Jul. 2021, pp. 1–4, doi: 10.1109/21CW48944.2021.9532565.
[10] E. Strickland, “Special report: Cyborg tech from the inside,” IEEE Spectr., May 2026. [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/specialreports/cyborg-tech/
[11] E. Gent, “Life with an experimental brain implant: Early users reveal what the technology gives—and what it takes,” IEEE Spectr., vol. 63, no. 5, pp. 32–50, May 2026. [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/bci-user-experience
[12] E. Strickland, “What exoskeletons learned from one relentless user,” IEEE Spectr., Apr. 2026. [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/exoskeleton-userexperience
[13] J. Harh, “AI aims for autonomous wheelchair navigation,” IEEE Spectr., Mar. 2026. [Online]. Available: https://spectrum.ieee.org/autonomoussmart-wheelchair