Thesis STS Research: The Mechanisms and Conditions of End-User Manipulation in For-Profit Mobile Health Applications
Published:
In Spring 2025, I completed the STS research portion of my thesis for my B.S. in Computer Science at the UVA School of Engineering and Applied Science. My research paper applied feature analysis to understand the mechanisms and conditions through which the features of the six top-grossing mHealth apps on the Google Play Store afford actions to their users.
Overview
Mobile health (mHealth) smartphone applications are a rapidly growing field, and one which is dominated by large, for-profit corporations. These apps employ theories of digital behavioral technology, gathering user data as a means to understand and ultimately influence user behavior. Due to the fact that corporations aggregate deeply sensitive personal health data and actively promote shifts in behavior towards normalized ideals of health, a power imbalance is created between mHealth app users and the corporations that control them. My STS research paper applied feature analysis to understand the mechanisms and conditions through which the features of the six top-grossing mHealth apps on the Google Play Store afford actions to their users. App store descriptions were a primary source of data for my analysis, allowing me to identify both the core features of the app and how the developers motivated feature use. I found that app features overwhelmingly required habitual self-tracking, which was motivated by appeals to affect (specifically, being “healthier”). However, the nature of app features themselves indicated that concrete, positive impacts on health outcomes were largely secondary to the continued collection and analysis of user data by the app. Therefore, I argued that whether a user can actually realize a perceived benefit from the app is dependent on whether the user is one of a normative, privileged few who can participate in the healthy activity defined by the app and navigate its patterns of manipulation without experiencing negative impacts or being exploited for commercial gain.