Working definition. Health is not perfect optimisation or the absence of every difficulty. It is a living capacity for balance, response, participation, and renewal.
Inherited meaning
Medical traditions have moved between treating disease, supporting whole-person wellbeing, and recognising the social conditions that shape life. Ecological and organisational uses extend health to systems whose vitality depends on diversity, feedback, and repair.
Meaning in the imagination economy
AI can help detect illness and personalise care, but it can also turn health into continuous surveillance and normal variation into risk scores. In the imagination economy, health is a criterion for futures: do they enlarge the capacity to live meaningfully, or merely increase measurable performance?
What changes in practice
Measure what people can do and become, not only what can be counted about them. Preserve consent, context, privacy, human care, and the possibility of being well without being constantly monitored.