An Anthropological Approach to mHealth

Edited by Charlotte Hawkins, Patrick Awondo, and Daniel Miller

Distributed for UCL Press

An Anthropological Approach to mHealth

Edited by Charlotte Hawkins, Patrick Awondo, and Daniel Miller

A study on the use of mobile health apps and human creativity.

An Anthropological Approach to mHealth underlines ten sixteen-month ethnographies, set across Asia, Africa, Europe, and Latin America, that revealed people’s use of communicative apps, including as LINE, WeChat, and WhatsApp’s alternative primary health apps, highlighting the irrelevance of dedicated health apps. Using a “smart-from-below” approach, this book studies these surprising practices and proposes a radically different anthropological method to the development and dissemination of mobile health (mHealth), a rapidly growing sector in healthcare.

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Table of Contents

List of figures
List of 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, China
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 Santiago, Chile
Alfonso Otaegui

7 An anthropological approach to tele-psychotherapy: providing ‘somewhere in-between’ to go
Charlotte Hawkins and John Mark Bwanika

Part III: Designing mHealth

8 From ‘datafication’ to socialization: rethinking self-tracking in Rural Japan
Laura Haapio-Kirk, Sasaki Lise 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
Marília Duque

11 Conclusion
Kate Hampshire

Index

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