Mobile Health Technology, Empowerment, and Self-Respect: A Feminist Analysis

Mobile health (mHealth) technologies are increasingly advertised by companies as means for health and wellbeing empowerment. Although several scholars have analyzed the notion of empowerment at play in mHealth discourses and identified crucial elements for its fulfillment, one theoretical framework that is especially absent in this discussion is that of relational theories of selfhood developed in feminist philosophy. In this article, the author aims to correct this deficit by offering a possible pathway to scrutinize mHealth technologies from a feminist perspective. Specifically, the author starts evaluating one type of mHealth, apps for tracking physical activity, through the lens of a feminist conception of self-respect. Doing this reveals a puzzling tension: whether the use of mHealth undermines self-respect or promotes it is not obvious.