A wealth of technological innovation in health and medicine has been introduced in recent years with the promise of transforming and potentially radically improving health and medical care. Alongside these innovations, such as with digital health apps, care robots or AI-assisted systems for diagnosis and treatment, come questions of how citizens‘ experience these technologies and how it shapes their expectations and acceptance of innovative tools. Relatedly, more still needs to be understood about how societal levels of trust in government or science, as well as individual values and goals, impact the perceived legitimacy of technology innovations.

To examine these questions, this project focuses on individual-level perspectives towards, and behavioural responses to the introduction of such new technologies. The project draws on data on electronic heath records and digital health apps across Germany and several European countries and employs various kinds of survey experiments. This approach aims to improve causal identification the mechanisms that influence expectations and acceptance of technologies, extend knowledge on this topic to novel transformative technologies for health and medicine, and shed light on possible disparities in access, use and potential benefits by gender, ethnicity, education level and other minority status.

The project supports TransforM’s objective to improve research on the governance and trust of transformative technologies with implications for a sector key to societal change, healthcare and medicine.