With a little help from a... machine: Welfare Technology and Sustainable Health Promotion.

This article discusses the role of technology, as a new political welfare strategy, in relation to health promotion and human welfare. The transformation into the era of digital welfare and the implementations of welfare technologies challenge the notion of sustainable health promotion. Replacing man with machine has implications for social interactions and thereby the perception of quality of life. Theoretically, I am approaching these arguments through WHO-definitions of health as well as by referring to contemporary health sociologists and health philosophers, who point to the crucial aspect of social human interaction. Empirically, the article draws on the work of my Ph.D. study of how to govern a population through pronounced political discourses of welfare optimization as a way of emphasizing sustainable actions. These discussions are brought to the fore of findings of another research project on speak computers as a health promoting technology for people with language impairments. The conclusion of this article is how speak computers represent a sustainable health promoting technology as they reinforce, as opposed to depriving, aspects of social interaction. The overall claim is that digital welfare as a new political welfare strategy necessitates a discussion on the concept of sustainable health promotion when social services through digital welfare alter previous perceptions of human welfare.