This book proposes a radically different anthropological approach to the development and dissemination of mobile health (m Health), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare. An Anthropological Approach to m Health 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, We Chat and Whats App, 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 m Health.
Table of Content
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 m Health
2 The smartphone and the ‘Human Plus’: an ethnographic review of m Health practices in Shanghai
Xinyuan Wang
3 m Health 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 m Health
6 The healthcare system, the smartphone, and the human factor: oncological nurses using Whats App 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 m Health
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 Whats App as a visual diary to uncover older Brazilians’ relationship with food in São Paulo, Brazil Marília Duque
11 Conclusion: towards an ethnographic approach to m Health
Kate Hampshire
Index
About the author
Daniel Miller is Professor of Anthropology at UCL. He has specialised in the anthropology of material culture, consumption and now digital anthropology. He recently directed the Why We Post project about the use and consequences of social media. He is author/editor of 47 books including The Comfort of Things, Stuff, The Global Smartphone and his most recent book The Good Enough Life.
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