Please join us for our next Brown Bag Seminar which will be held in-person, with a virtual option. The seminar will feature Dr. Verina Wild, professor of the ethics of medicine and director of the Institute for Ethics and History of Health in Society at the University of Augsburg, discussing her research, “Empowered by health apps? Responsibility for health and concerns of justice.”

Verina Wild is Professor of Ethics of Medicine and Director of the Institute for Ethics and History of Health in Society at the University of Augsburg. Being trained as a physician, she has been researching and teaching bioethics, public and global health ethics and theories of health justice at Universities in Switzerland and Germany. Her special interest is in the relation between the individual, the population and the social and environmental structures. Her latest book on health inequalities, co-authored with a social epidemiologist, brings public health ethics and social epidemiology together. Since 2018 she is lead investigator of the project “META – mHealth: ethical, legal and social aspects in the technological age“, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

Empowered by health apps? Responsibility for health and concerns of justice 

An important potential of health apps is seen in their promotion and support of individual responsibility for health. Hopes are that using health apps widely can increase users’ independency from health experts it can increase efficiency in health care systems reach so far underreached groups it can support self-awareness and capability for one’s own health promotion prevention and disease management. In short: health apps can empower users. This talk discusses the relation to health inequities: Does it matter for the promotion and implementation of health apps that societies are unequal and that health is distributed along a worrying social gradient in health? Can and should promoters and developers of health apps care for social injustices in health – and if so how? In this talk the case is made for a more nuanced understanding of justice and responsibilities in relation to the narrative of “empowering health apps”.