Smartphones, Smart Ageing and mHealth

Project Information

SmartPhoneSmartAging

Grant agreement ID: 740472

DOI

10.3030/740472

Project closed

EC signature date 6 September 2017

Start date 1 October 2017

End date 31 March 2023

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 2 549 908,00

EU contribution

€ 2 499 908,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITY COLLEGE LONDON
United Kingdom

Periodic Reporting for period 4 - SmartPhoneSmartAging (Smartphones, Smart Ageing and mHealth)

Reporting period: 2022-04-01 to 2023-03-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project aimed to understand the global impact of smartphones, now that they are used by people of all ages and not just youth. This meant an emphasis on what people actually do with smartphones as part of everyday life within communities. We would also examine how the smartphone changes our relationship to age itself. The third component would examine how the results of our research might be employed to improve the welfare of populations, principally through projects concerned with the use of smartphones for health.
With regard to smartphones, we found that the literature and popular focus is narrowly constrained to certain constantly repeated topics such as smartphone addiction, fake news, the impact on children and political consequences. Our project therefore turned from such public discourses to instead provide the foundational materials for teaching, based on a more holistic and objective scholarship as to what smartphones have actually become as part of everyday life and an evidence-based appraisal of their wider consequences across all sectors.
Our research resulted in a radically different understanding of the smartphone as neither SMART, nor a phone. We describe them as our Transportal Home, a place within which we now live and carry out many of the same activities we would associate with a residence, including entertainment, work, organising our lives, finding information and engaging with the wider world. As well as a portal to connect directly to other people’s transportal homes. Smartphones provide us with Perpetual Opportunism thanks to their constant availability. They extend social media to constitute a rise in Visual Conversation and go Beyond Anthropomorphism in having a more intimate relationship to persons than any prior device. We also found that they lead to a Return of the Extended Family and a change in the relationship between Care and Surveillance. Each of these general findings differs in detail across our respective fieldsites.
Our evidence is equally challenging to our previous concept of ageing, highlighting the impact of growing life expectancy that diminishes identification with any particular category of age such as young or old. Finally, our study took responsibility for demonstrating its consequences for welfare through our many case studies that investigated the implications for adult health, as well as providing advice and interventions, such as a manual on using WhatsApp for health purposes.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Research consisted of mostly 16 month ethnographies,in 9 countries. The results are provided through 10 Open Access volumes, including 7 monographs, detailing our research in China, Japan, Uganda, Italy, Ireland, Brazil and Chile. Each monograph includes chapters discussing the impact of smartphones on the experience of ageing, the relationship to kinship and the wider community, the background landscape of platforms, apps and infrastructure, the way smartphones are used to consider the future and life purpose and the relationship to everyday life and to health.
They key presentation of our comparative work, which also includes material from our research with Palestinians and in Cameroon is through our collective book The Global Smartphone This was translated into Arabic, French, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish so as to be available to people in all our fieldsites, The book includes our rethinking of the smartphone as the Transportal Home. It considers the generalisable original insights concerned with the new forms of visual communication, or care across distance. It also demonstrates the importance of regional diversity such as the way older people identify with this technology in China, unlike all the other fieldsites.
An additional special issue of the journal Anthropology and Aging includes contributions from the entire team focusing on our insights regarding ageing. In many places older people may suffer initially from a new digital divide, but mastery of the smartphone may then create a reengagement with continuity from their youth. The volume The Good Enough Life goes beyond these findings to fundamentally challenge the relationship between the disciplines of anthropology and philosophy.
Our volume The anthropology of mHealth documents the way we have used our research to try and benefit the welfare of populations, with case studies ranging from nurses in an oncology unit in Chile, to nutrition in Brazil. We also describe our campaign to improve dissemination of health information in Trinidad and Tobago based on our observations of the failure of vaccination programmes during COVID.
Our findings and publications have been extensively reported in the media. The initial launch of our results went viral across the world press with an emphasis upon our arguments for the death of proximity that complements the death of distance, where smartphones are used to engage with people irrespective of their physical location.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Most of our results were unenvisaged, emerging directly from fieldwork. We did not imagine such a radical rethinking of the very nature of the smartphone or a fundamental change in the experience of ageing. For example, retirement may now cover several decades, as long as people’s entire working life, yet is largely considered as an event rather than the continued transformation that we have studied. Similarly, we found that an initial digital divide for older people may be replaced through mastery of the smartphone by a re-engagement with continuity from youth.
We also did not envisage our final emphasis on what we call Smart-from-below. The project started with an expectation of working with developers and people who create apps as the `cause’ behind what smartphones do. But we found that smartphones are transformed so extensively by users that it is the ingenuity and creativity of users that mainly determines what the smartphone becomes. We extensively illustrate this Smart-from-below perspective, for example, through people’s rejection of bespoke health apps and replacement of these by the way they transform other apps into health apps.
Rather than universalise our findings, we employed our 9 country study, to show how the use and consequences of smartphones vary considerably across the globe. Populations without access to banks in Uganda, see them as the hub for money transfer. In Brazil the smartphone is mainly WhatsApp, in Japan it is LINE and in China it is WeChat.
Much of our progress beyond the state of the art was methodological. Most studies of smartphones have been conducted as a relationship between an individual and their smartphone. We demonstrated that scholarly study needs to encompass the wider social and cultural environment, where smartphones are often embedded in larger relationships. We call this social ecology. But the smartphone has also to be understood in relation to other screens and devices we call screen ecology. We also found a radical difference between asking people about smartphones, which creates a largely negative discourse, as against our method of taking stories about every single app, which then focuses on the new capabilities presented by these devices. Our work also demonstrated the value of a global comparative study that went well beyond any precedents in showing that the smartphone may heterogenies and not just homogenise the world, as people find creative ways to deploy them.

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