mHealth Apps and Structural Injustice

Mobile health apps for self-monitoring have become increasingly present in public health strategies over the recent years. Due to their promise to improve individual health, they imply that by their wide distribution they could help tackle present and future public health challenges such as diabetes, cardio-vascular disease, or depression. Simultaneously, private providers of mHealth apps must overcome challenges rooted in existing inequalities if they aspire to make their products available to the wider public and live up to public health demands. Although such inequalities have been discussed along traditional categories such as income, level of education, or geographical location, age, gender, and race, only little attention has been paid to the structural circumstances that manifest and bring those inequalities about. This dissertation seeks to answer the question of which inequalities matter most for the potential public health benefits of mHealth apps to realize. Moreover, it meets the challenge of discussing the providers’ responsibility to mitigate the structural injustices linked to mHealth apps.