Team Check-in Worksheet

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Jan 9, 2024

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Technology Research Project – Team Check-in Worksheet ANTH 210 Technology & Culture Fall 2023 By now, your team has selected its topic/ technology and should have shared your annotated bibliographies. PROJECT TOPIC NAMES OF MEMBER(S) PRESENT Group 19: Digital Smartwatches Michaela Befort, Arnav Patel, Riley Ramsey, Dhruv Sakthive l Step 1) Discuss your annotated bibliographies with your teammates. What did you find out about your technology and its life-cycle? What about the sourcing of its raw material components? Its discard or recycling phase? Problems: ● Water usage and contamination (ecosystem damage, water supply damage to neighboring communities) when harvesting raw materials, processing, and distributing. Too, at the end of the devices’ life, the pollution that their components produce when disposed of improperly ● Solutions to “greener” supply chain practices are there, but higher-ups have hesitations implementing them due to money/cutting into profits (even if it is better for the future but whatever. Profits I guess) ● Worker dignity infringement ● State control choking out attempts at labor organization/protests via imprisonment ● Lack of political regulation placed on mega corporations that dampen the control companies have on the society ● Tightening of media coverage that reports on working conditions (specifically, the cluster suicides that have happpened) ● Lack of wide-spread, accessible electronic recycling infrastructure ● Minority exploitation – stemming from the majority of Foxxconn’s largest factory's employees being migrants. ● Electronic overconsumption due to marketing ● Data collection and usage Potential redesigns:

● Benefits proposed to companies that implement existing greener measures ● Tighter regulation on reporting where materials come from ● Implementing federal programs that kick benefits towards companies that use recycled materials ● Regulating marketing from large corporations ● Banning of proportionally toxic components and non-recyclable components ● Potential redesigns: sourcing recycled materials, biodegradable materials , natural and synthetic nonwoven materials, etc. ( Sustainability | Free Full-Text | Sustainable Solutions for Wearable Technologies: Mapping the Product Development Life Cycle (mdpi.com) ) ● explicitly state that collecting and selling of data is being done, and get user agreement Step 2) Review the assignment description and rubric for the Tech Project Redesign Presentation. Discuss how your technology might be redesigned for greater inclusivity. How would you define inclusion? Are there certain segments of society that are restricted from using your technology based on ability, class, gender, etc.? The largest barrier to accessing our technology is cost, but within usage, the wearable technology has to be interfaced with using digits on a very small screen. I came across a lot of articles toting the potential monitoring benefits of smartwatches for cardiovascular health intervention, but at-risk elderly populations often don't have a background in tech and may have dexterity/vision issues that make navigating something like a smartwatch difficult. Too, this proposed use of smart watches for health intervention is not covered by insurance. Additionally, the wearability of this tech requires wrists of a size to work – the monitoring tech cannot work without a pulse point of a wrist. Smaller bands exist, but the use is moot if the user does not have a second wrist. Step 3) Discuss the ethical associations with your technology. Are there any guidelines that might make your technology more ethical in consideration of raw resource acquisition, energy expenditure (i.e. what is the carbon footprint of your technology?) or even government policy to regulate your technology for fairer use? ● Analysis of where in manufacturing process has the greatest carbon footprint: ○ Based on Xiomi smartwatch: 99.1% comes from assembly, and 84% stems from PCB manufacturing (creating the circuit board). ○ Metal & Fossil depletion: USB cable and PCB body made from various metals ○ ( Environmental impact analysis of smartwatch using SimaPro8 tools and energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) technique | IEEE Conference Publication | IEEE Xplore ) ● Environmental Certifications like EPEAT and ENERGY STAR

● Ethical Sourcing Standards like Responsible Minerals Initiative or Responsible Business Alliance Consumer Ethics- Smartwatches, such as the ones made by Google, Garmin, and Apple, have benefited consumers through health, safety, and location tracking. Numerous smartwatches now have the ability to track heart rates, blood pressure, health symptoms, glucose levels, location, sleep patterns, and menstrual cycles. This asset can have exceptional consumer benefits and even save lives, but illegal and immoral company policy may neglect the customer. Lawsuits around selling of private information, HIPAA violation, and unauthorized location tracking have become more frequent due to the growth in Smartwatches. This development has caused new laws around electronic regulation and customer safety to be passed to ensure consumer and company morality. Materials Ethics- Smartwatches are e-waste. E-waste are recyclable products that contain electronic parts. However, the batteries should be removed from the Smartwatch before they are recycled in any form. https://stocktonrecycles.com/guide/watches/#:~:text=Smartwatches%20Are%20E%2DWaste,ho w%20to%20recycle%20e%2Dwaste . Step 4) Make a plan for the redesign presentation. How will you record your presentation? How will you split up the presentation sections? We will record our sections of the presentation asynchronously and then merge the videos together when everyone has finished their part. The presentation will be split up based on the different sections of our project that need to be covered. Each section is already pretty evenly, so giving each person 1 section to present. Each teammate will fill out the following worksheet and submit to Brightspace > Course Tools > Assignments. When did your team meet? November 18 Were all team members present? Yes Do you feel like all ideas and opinions were listened to? Yes

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Briefly describe how your team will divide assignment responsibilities for the Redesign Presentation: The way we plan on dividing our work is by having each person work on the slides that they will be presenting in our video. The sections of the presentation will be: 1) Introduction 2) Why we choose digital smartwatches and their background 3) Why the process of creation of smartwatches has many ethical dilemmas 4) why a redesign of how materials are collected and worker regulations are important 5) How we can make these redesigns 6) Conclusion

Team Check-in Worksheet

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