'You have to put a lot of trust in me': autonomy, trust, and trustworthiness in the context of mobile apps for mental health

Trust and trustworthiness are essential for good healthcare, especially in mental healthcare. New technologies, such as mobile health apps, can affect trust relationships. In mental health, some apps need the trust of their users for therapeutic efficacy and explicitly ask for it, for example, throu...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Müller, Regina (Author) , Primc, Nadia (Author) , Kuhn, Eva (Author)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 2023
In: Medicine, health care and philosophy
Year: 2023, Volume: 26, Issue: 3, Pages: 313-324
ISSN:1572-8633
DOI:10.1007/s11019-023-10146-y
Online Access:Verlag, lizenzpflichtig, Volltext: https://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11019-023-10146-y
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Author Notes:Regina Müller, Nadia Primc, Eva Kuhn
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Summary:Trust and trustworthiness are essential for good healthcare, especially in mental healthcare. New technologies, such as mobile health apps, can affect trust relationships. In mental health, some apps need the trust of their users for therapeutic efficacy and explicitly ask for it, for example, through an avatar. Suppose an artificial character in an app delivers healthcare. In that case, the following questions arise: Whom does the user direct their trust to? Whether and when can an avatar be considered trustworthy? Our study aims to analyze different dimensions of trustworthiness in the context of mobile health app use. We integrate O'Neill's account of autonomy, trust, and trustworthiness into a model of trustworthiness as a relational concept with four relata: B is trustworthy with respect to A regarding the performance of Z because of C. Together with O'Neill's criteria of trustworthiness (honesty, competence, and reliability), this four-sided model is used to analyze different dimensions of trustworthiness in an exemplary case of mobile health app use. Our example focuses on an app that uses an avatar and is intended to treat sleep difficulties. The conceptual analysis shows that interpreting trust and trustworthiness in health app use is multi-layered and involves a net of interwoven universal obligations. At the same time, O'Neill's approach to autonomy, trust, and trustworthiness offers a normative account to structure and analyze these complex relations of trust and trustworthiness using mobile health apps.
Item Description:Gesehen am 06.09.2023
veröffentlicht: 30. März 2023
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:1572-8633
DOI:10.1007/s11019-023-10146-y