Phenomenology and empowerment in self-testing apps.

Abstract

Although self-testing apps, a form of mobile health (mHealth) apps, are often marketed as empowering, it is not obvious how exactly they can empower their users-and in which sense of the word. In this article, I discuss two conceptualisations of empowerment as polar opposites-one in health promotion/mHealthand one in feminist theory-and demonstrate how both their applications to individually used self-testing apps run into problems. The first, prevalent in health promotion and mHealth, focuses on internal states and understands empowerment as an individual process. However, this version of empowerment has been accused of paternalism and responsibilisation. The second, feminist version considers structural conditions and foregrounds collective, political change, whose realisation is not obviously attainable for an individually used app. By pointing out the flaws of the positions that focus on either internal states or external conditions, and by engaging with theory from critical phenomenology, I argue that the interplay between them is where empowerment can take place. I propose to formulate empowerment in phenomenological terms as a shift in being-in-the-world and discuss how this conceptualisation of empowerment would avoid the criticism of previous empowerment narratives while being realisable by self-testing apps.