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An Anthropological Approach to mHealth

Author
Hawkins, Charlotte
Published
London UCL Press 2024
Physical Description
1 online resource (279 p.)
Additional Creators
Awondo, Patrick, Awondo, Patrick, Hawkins, Charlotte, Miller, Daniel, and Miller, Daniel
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Series
Language Note
English
Restrictions on Access
Open Access Unrestricted online access
Summary
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.
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ISBN
111.9781787354234
9781787354234
9781787354241
9781787354258
9781787354265
9781787355767
9781787359611
9781787359666
9781787359710
9781787359963
9781800084100
9781800084629
9781800085138
9781910634448
9781910634493
Collection
OAPEN Library.
Terms of Use and Reproduction
Creative Commons https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
View MARC record | catkey: 46156284