About
Leon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and an Early-Stage Researcher (ESR) in the PROTECT project. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Philosophy from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Before his Ph.D., Leon worked as an academic assistant at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) at Technical University, Munich (TUM) and did a traineeship in the Private Office of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Giovanni Buttarelli in Brussels. His interests lie in philosophy, ethics of technology, digital policy, and data protection.
PhD-Project Description
Mobile health, so-called mHealth, is an emerging domain of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that is said to change the delivery of primary and preventive care. Providing digital means for health monitoring and the digital delivery of health services are at the center of this domain. Especially mHealth apps, which can easily be installed on the users’ devices offer great potential to provide access to such services. mHealth is therefore said to make healthcare more just. This technology is also an instance of a development driven by economic considerations to make the health sector more cost-efficient and to gain user data for use in medical innovation and non-medical domains alike.
The main question I want to answer in my dissertation is whether mHealth can fulfill the promise of promoting social justice in healthcare or whether it runs the risk of entrenching already existing inequalities even more, thereby disadvantaging especially those groups most vulnerable in our societies. My approach defines mHealth apps as a public health intervention that needs to be assessed by referring to ethical frameworks located in public health ethics. I am especially interested in how certain value trade-offs users of mHealth apps have to make affect social justice. Users might find themselves in situations where they have to compromise certain aspects of their well-being in exchange for the health benefit provided by the app. I am investigating under what circumstances this renders such mutually advantageous agreements unfair, especially in cases where users must rely on mHealth apps or belong to disadvantaged groups.
Check my posts for PROTECT here.
Leon is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Twente in the Netherlands and an Early-Stage Researcher (ESR) in the PROTECT project. He holds a bachelor’s and master’s degree in Philosophy from Ludwig-Maximilians-University, Munich. Before his Ph.D., Leon worked as an academic assistant at the Munich Center for Technology in Society (MCTS) at Technical University, Munich (TUM) and did a traineeship in the Private Office of the European Data Protection Supervisor (EDPS) Giovanni Buttarelli in Brussels. His interests lie in philosophy, ethics of technology, digital policy, and data protection.
PhD-Project Description
Mobile health, so-called mHealth, is an emerging domain of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) that is said to change the delivery of primary and preventive care. Providing digital means for health monitoring and the digital delivery of health services are at the center of this domain. Especially mHealth apps, which can easily be installed on the users’ devices offer great potential to provide access to such services. mHealth is therefore said to make healthcare more just. This technology is also an instance of a development driven by economic considerations to make the health sector more cost-efficient and to gain user data for use in medical innovation and non-medical domains alike.
The main question I want to answer in my dissertation is whether mHealth can fulfill the promise of promoting social justice in healthcare or whether it runs the risk of entrenching already existing inequalities even more, thereby disadvantaging especially those groups most vulnerable in our societies. My approach defines mHealth apps as a public health intervention that needs to be assessed by referring to ethical frameworks located in public health ethics. I am especially interested in how certain value trade-offs users of mHealth apps have to make affect social justice. Users might find themselves in situations where they have to compromise certain aspects of their well-being in exchange for the health benefit provided by the app. I am investigating under what circumstances this renders such mutually advantageous agreements unfair, especially in cases where users must rely on mHealth apps or belong to disadvantaged groups.
Check my posts for PROTECT here.