Miller, Daniel and Hawkins, Charlotte and Awondo, Patrick (Eds).
(2024)
An Anthropological Approach to mHealth.
[Book].
Ageing with Smartphones.
UCL Press: London, UK.
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Abstract
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.
| Type: | Book |
|---|---|
| Title: | An Anthropological Approach to mHealth |
| ISBN-13: | 9781787354 34 |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/111.9781787354234 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/111.9781787354234 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Collection © Editors, 2024 Text © Contributors, 2024 Images © Contributors and copyright holders named in captions, 2024 Any third-party material in this book is published under the book’s Creative Commons licence unless indicated otherwise in the credit line to the material. If you would like to reuse any third-party material not covered by the book’s Creative Commons licence, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. This book is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial- NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. This licence allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the work for personal and non-commercial use providing author and publisher attribution is clearly stated. Attribution should include the following information: Hawkins, C., Awondo, P. and Miller, D. (eds). 2024. An Anthropological Approach to mHealth. London: UCL Press. https://doi.org/10.14324/ 111.9781787354234 Further details about Creative Commons licences are available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses |
| Keywords: | mHealth, smartphones, health, global, anthropology |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Anthropology |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10198499 |
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