Mobile health and its problems: the case of hearing and communication apps

This chapter unpacks the “problems” that mobile health apps set out to address. Much of mHealth presents health as a problem of individual biomedical deficits that can be tackled through better information, more effective communication with practitioners, greater compliance with medication – broadly more effective self-monitoring and self-management. This way of presenting health problems largely sidelines the social, environmental, and economic determinants of health. Many companies, although by no means all, frame and market hearing and communication apps in similar ways. Apps that screen or rehabilitate hearing generally accept a biomedical frame. Some others, such as decibel meters apps, acknowledge the potentially hazardous impact of toxic environments – especially loud noise – in producing bodily damage. Usually, however, individual app users are presented as responsible for identifying those hazards and addressing them. In the case of apps that monitor the length of time headphones are worn and the volume of the music played on them, the user is also understood as the unwitting instigator of hearing damage.