Popular media and public health care discourses describe an increasing number of mobile health technologies. These applications tend to be presented as a means of achieving patient empowerment, patient-centered care, and cost-reduction in public health care. Few of these accounts examine the health perspectives informing these technologies or the practices of the users of mobile health applications and the kind of data they collect. This article proposes a critical approach to analyzing digital health technologies based on different visions of disease, namely disease, illness, and sickness. The proposed analytical classification system is applied to a set of "mobile health solutions" presented by the Norwegian Technology Council and juxtaposed with the reported use and non-use of several mobile health applications among young patients with Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD). The discussion shows how visions on health and disease can affect a patient's embodied experiences of a physical condition, and, secondly, illustrates how the particular vision inscribed in a mobile health technology can be negotiated to include the patient's vision.
The rapid growth in the field of m-health has not gone unnoticed by the mainstream media in Norway. Norwegian newspapers have a strong presence and outreach and hence play an important role in shaping of the public discourse on various subjects with m-health being no exception. This article presents a Dispositive Analysis of 23 articles from 6 national newspapers concerning mobile health applications. The analysis resulted in an interpretation of the press's technology views as theories of technology, which informed the discussion in this paper. Further, the newspaper articles were understood as discursive practices and analyzed by applying the concept of dispositives. The results of the analysis suggest inclusion of Dispositive Analysis as a step in Participatory Design process as means of enriching the design practices as well as uncovering the marginalized ‘voices' and thus addressing the call for democratization of technology.
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