Visions of Illness, Disease, and Sickness in Mobile Health Applications

Abstract

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.

Patients’ Perceptions of mHealth Apps: Meta-Ethnographic Review of Qualitative Studies

“…From the patients’ point of view, mHealth could facilitate communication with health care providers and other patients, encourage them to be more participative during clinical encounters, and promote the use of coping techniques to manage their illness. However, some studies based on other methods have shown that some patients are reluctant to use mHealth apps, which is paradoxically the case with adolescent patients because they want to separate their feelings of being a patient from those of being a teenager and make their illnesses and diseases invisible [66]. In addition, they find apps, especially those with push notifications, annoying, intrusive, and time consuming [66].…”

“…However, some studies based on other methods have shown that some patients are reluctant to use mHealth apps, which is paradoxically the case with adolescent patients because they want to separate their feelings of being a patient from those of being a teenager and make their illnesses and diseases invisible [66]. In addition, they find apps, especially those with push notifications, annoying, intrusive, and time consuming [66]. Patients also stated that although these technical health innovations have supported them in many different respects, they still view their providers as the first point of contact to be consulted for discussing the options available.…”

Feminist Technoscience as a Resource for Working with Science Practices, a Critical Approach, and Gender Equality in Swedish Higher IT Educations

“…The theoretical discussions in the field of feminist technoscience during the last years have centered on a number of 'turns' such as the posthumanist, materialist and ontological turn [52], and also the term Anthropocene is discussed [46]. These ideas have been used by a number of researchers in order to explore how gender and other aspects of reality are inscribed into information technology [5], [40], the accountability of designers, and strategies for designing without inscribing fixed or naturalized notions of gender into designs [47], entanglements of humans and machines [41], [16], sociomaterial relations in participatory design methods [15], gendered discourses in IT educations [12], and legal, ethical, and moral questions that surround security technologies [43]. These researchers focus on how, in design and use practices, humans are entangled with materialities (technological and other), how sociopolitical realities such as gender, ethnicity and class are inscribed into technologies which in turn reproduces these realities.…”