Kapeller Alexandra
Department for Thematic Studies: Technology and Social Change, Linköping University, Hus T, Campus Valla, Linköping, 58183, Sweden.
Health Care Anal. 2024 Dec 27. doi: 10.1007/s10728-024-00498-8.
Research on mobile health (mHealth) applications has investigated how such technologies contribute to a responsibilisation of users/patients. This literature largely focuses on the individual responsibilities constructed by the apps and the neoliberal environments that enable the positioning of the user as responsible. With this focus, this scholarship is less attentive to the role of social relations in responsibilisation. In this article, I demonstrate how relational responsibilities are constructed in the communication of a North American self-testing app for "early changes in cognition". Through an analysis of qualitative expert interviews and images on the app's web presence, I show how social relations are, in fact, mobilised in the construction of the responsibilities to support the user in the test situation, to take the test for the sake of others, and to make others take the test. Based on this analysis, I argue that the role of social relations should receive more attention in the literature on responsibilisation, because they lead to additional, sometimes gendered responsibilities that a focus on individual responsibilities would miss.
移动健康（mHealth）应用程序的研究探讨了此类技术如何促使用户/患者承担责任。该文献主要关注应用程序构建的个人责任以及使将用户定位为责任人成为可能的新自由主义环境。基于此关注点，该学术研究较少关注社会关系在责任承担中的作用。在本文中，我展示了在一款针对“认知早期变化”的北美自测应用程序的交流中，关系责任是如何构建的。通过对定性专家访谈以及该应用程序网络展示中的图像进行分析，我展示了社会关系实际上是如何在责任构建中被调动起来的，以在测试情境中支持用户、为他人进行测试以及促使他人进行测试。基于这一分析，我认为社会关系的作用在关于责任承担的文献中应得到更多关注，因为它们会导致额外的、有时带有性别差异的责任，而专注于个人责任会忽略这些责任。
