This discussion considers how health risks have affected the design and use of communications media in the United States. Concentrating upon one technology (the cell phone), and one health risk (coronary heart disease) in the late 1960s, I look at how a virtually unknown, peculiarly fanatical company - Motorola - was determined to build the world's first high-tech fitness supplement: a portable, wireless telephone that would encourage Americans to exercise and reduce their susceptibility to heart disease.

Drawing upon mortality statistics, health insurance premiums, and Star Trek in equal measure, Motorola's fever-dream design challenge spawned a 26 billion dollar market for healthcare media while raising a host of provocative questions. How will gadgets like cell phones alter our ties to mainstream medicine in the coming years? Will doctors and pharmaceutical companies begin to lose their authority to Silicon Valley darlings like Motorola, Apple, and Fitbit? And are consumer technologies -- slick, expensive, and always in danger of obsolescence -- really the best way to get people to take care of their health? Beyond these questions, a larger concern looms. If conglomerates such as Motorola have decided to intervene in the most intimate aspects of our individual lives, what does this mean for our relationship to other institutions - such as our government - which have traditionally attempted to support our health?

Producer: Paul Gansky

Paul Gansky is a Media Studies instructor at the Ross School in East Hampton. He recently received his PhD from the University of Texas at Austin. His research spans media archaeology, the social construction of communications media, and the history of healthcare, with sporadic forays into the domestic technology, convenience culture, industrial design, and film. His writing has appeared in Design Observer, The Journal of Design History, Flow,The Journal of Popular Culture, Mediascape, and Film History.