Digital health: practices and infrastructures

Digital health is currently a widely used but vaguely defined term. In policy discourses as well as everyday talks it signifies emerging technologies that are increasingly adopted across various practices of health and medicine. The sociological perspective is interested in the relationship between technologies and practices as well as their orchestration within and through wider infrastructures at play. This chapter explores this relationality through a sociomaterial approach. Thereby, we elaborate an analytical notion of digital health that facilitates critical investigations of the opportunities and constraints encountered within practices of care. The concept of infrastructures traces the relation between local practices and wider ecologies of care. While often invisible, infrastructures are configuring how people participate in care. These forms of material participation shift alongside technological advances. Yet, participation is not always invited nor are technological innovations always envisioned by health providers or tech companies. At the fringes of established care infrastructures, we can observe emerging forms of digital health activism. Recognised as real utopias, health activists’ enactments can stimulate our imaginations about desirable digital health futures.