Paper short abstract:

This paper explores how the portability of mobile health technologies blurs the normative categories of healthcare and lifestyle. Based on this analysis, the concept of "health style" is introduced as an heuristic tool to understand trends in current healthcare policies and systems.

Paper long abstract:

Health apps and wearable sensors connected to smart phones or other mobile portable devices ("mobile health technologies"- mHT) are increasingly envisioned as offering an opportunity to "transform healthcare" by cutting costs, increasing the agency of patients, facilitating the maintenance of unified standards in the clinic and beyond as well as addressing global health issues. These mobile monitoring and measuring devices have raised the interest of markets and policy makers who welcome their introduction in healthcare systems.

mHT however, can't be expected to provide easy solutions to current problems. In particular, the portability of these devices plays an important role in reconfiguring socio-technical medical and lifestyle contexts, relationships and normative categories. The relocation of healthcare outside the traditional spaces and the blurring of established categories, such as 'healthcare' and 'lifestyle' challenge the assumptions that are currently ingrained in our healthcare system and medical practice, including the distinction between patients, health care providers, and carers, and the responsibilities allocated to them.

This contribution engages in a preliminary assessment of the expectations about the revolutionary character of mobile health. To this aim, policy and market discourses around mobile health are mapped and discussed. This mapping exercise focuses on the conceptualization and presentations of categories such as "healthcare" and "lifestyle". Finally, using examples of three types of m-health applications (for professionals, healthy citizens and chronic patients) the heuristic concept of "healthstyle" is introduced. This concept helps to understand some trends in "lifestylization of medicine" that accompanies discourses on m-health.