| Sumario: | Purpose In this paper, we examine whether current practices of Health Technology Assessment (HTA), are suitable to support innovation governance and policies in personal health systems (PHS). We focus on the implicit representations of users and their position in the innovation process that underlie established HTA practices, and we explore how these representations are conducive to health technology decisions that allow older people to live meaningful and active lives. Our analysis builds on Callon's recent distinction between prosthetic and habilitation social policies. Method The paper revisits the results of two case studies that we conducted in Point-of-Care Diagnostics and care robot service platforms operating in domestic environments. For the first study, the technical, medical, and clinical literature and review articles on Point-of-Care diagnostics and biosensor technology were analyzed. Additionally, we interviewed 11 representatives of organizations in the Dutch health care system, including medical specialists, scientists, business developers, health policy actors, secondary patient care coordinators, health insurance employees, and general practitioners. For the second study, we investigated the design processes of two PHS service robot platforms and explored how designers address the challenges of technology at the intersection of health innovation and consumer products. In particular, we conducted 8 comprehensive interviews with key participants in the projects. For both studies, we applied a grounded-theory inspired qualitative approach using an open-coding scheme. Results & Discussion By contrasting insights from these cases, we demonstrate how a different logic of addressing values in innovation feeds into either prosthetic or habilitation policy decisions about health technology. Based on this analysis, we demonstrate that HTA practices need to re-think the position of older persons in relation to emerging health innovations in order to support active and meaningful aging.
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