Publication date: 28 October 2024
DOI: https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787354234
Number of illustrations: 22
An Anthropological Approach to mHealth
Charlotte Hawkins (Editor), Patrick Awondo (Editor), Daniel Miller (Editor)
Series: Ageing with Smartphones
This book proposes a radically different anthropological approach to the development and dissemination of mobile health (mHealth), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare. An Anthropological Approach to mHealth is based on ten 16-month ethnographies in settings across Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America that showed how conventional health apps may be irrelevant particularly for older people. Instead, the studies found that many people use their mobile and smartphones for health purposes to a surprising extent. They take the communicative apps they have become comfortable with, such as LINE, WeChat and WhatsApp, and are highly creative in turning them into their own health apps. These are the practices from which this book seeks to learn, in what we call a ‘smart-from-below’ approach.
This body of research also provided many additional insights, including the consequences of googling for health information, the role of the smartphone in specific settings such as an oncology clinic in Chile or tele-psychotherapy in Uganda, and the lessons learnt during Covid-19 around the problems in self-tracking. Overall, the authors show how an anthropological approach situated in the observation of everyday life can be the foundation for an alternative but highly promising perspective on the future of mHealth.
List of figures and tables
List of contributors
List of abbreviations
Series foreword
Acknowledgements
1 Introduction: health and care in the smartphone age
Charlotte Hawkins and Daniel Miller
Part I: Contextualising mHealth
2 The smartphone and the ‘Human Plus’: an ethnographic review of mHealth practices in Shanghai
Xinyuan Wang
3 mHealth initiatives in Yaoundé: between ‘good technology’ and ‘wrong messages’
Patrick Awondo
4 Care, communication and Covid: notes from a Milan neighbourhood
Shireen Walton
5 Doctor Google will see you first
Daniel Miller
Part II: Informing mHealth
6 The healthcare system, the smartphone, and the human factor: oncological nurses using WhatsApp at a public hospital in Chile
Alfonso Otaegui
7 An anthropological approach to telepsychotherapy: providing ‘somewhere in-between’ to go
Charlotte Hawkins and John Mark Bwanika
Part III: Designing mHealth
8 From ‘datafication’ to socialisation: rethinking self-tracking in rural Japan
Laura Haapio-Kirk, Sasaki Rise and Kimura Yumi
9 From menopause to hypertension: securing engagement
Pauline Garvey, Daniel Miller and Sheba Mohammid
10 ‘I take care of what I eat to be in better health’: using WhatsApp as a visual diary to uncover older Brazilians’ relationship with food in São Paulo, Brazil Marília Duque
11 Conclusion: towards an ethnographic approach to mHealth
Kate Hampshire
Index
DOI: 10.14324/111.9781787354234
Number of illustrations: 22
Publication date: 28 October 2024
PDF ISBN: 9781787354234
EPUB ISBN: 9781787354265
Hardback ISBN: 9781787354258
Paperback ISBN: 9781787354241
Charlotte Hawkins (Editor) 
Charlotte Hawkins is Postdoctoral Researcher in Social Anthropology. Her work focuses on social economies of mental health and wellbeing.
Patrick Awondo (Editor)
Patrick Awondo is a lecturer at the University of Yaoundé 1.
Daniel Miller (Editor)
Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at University College London. He previously led the Why We Post project on the use and consequence of social media and the ASSA project on smartphone use amongst older people. These resulted in 20 volumes published by UCL Press.
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