Paper short abstract:

This paper explores practices of ‘invited’ participation in mHealth innovation, arguing that understanding these as non- innocent ‘care practices’ enables a focus on new modes of care emerging alongside the mHealth platform and on how we are co-constructing these through our sociotechnical studies.

Paper long abstract:

This paper reflects on the practices of participation taking place in the sociotechnical evaluation element of a 5-year care innovation project (EU Horizon2020) that is developing, implementing and evaluating an mHealth platform for self-management in HIV care. We reflect on the first year of our engagement with the HIV community to explore the participative practices that are emerging and the relationship between individual and more collective forms of participation as people with HIV engage both as 'patients' who may use the app in their treatment and care and as a more collective group of 'people living with HIV', engaged in a process of co-design to develop and evaluate the app from design stage to routine use.

To make sense of emergent participation practices, we engage with Wehling's notion of 'invited' participation and Nielsen's notion of participation as 'convincing-through-dialogue', a 'soft technology' of participatory society. We also work with Langstrupp and Nielsen's conceptualisation of eHealth technologies as 'participatory technologies' that pose as 'soft structures' to their users and the idea that participatory practices may therefore be seen as 'tactics' that result in users 'making do' with arrangements that are given to them. We argue that turning to 'matters of care' (Puig de la Bellacasa), and understanding these participatory practices as non-innocent 'care practices' might enable us to retain focus not only on the new modes of care emerging alongside the mHealth platform but, as importantly, on how we are co-constructing these through our sociotechnical studies.