Health promotion in hybrid everyday life: the digital determinants of health

The Ottawa Charter for Health Promotion (1986) framed health as a resource produced in the settings of everyday life. Forty years later, people inhabit hybrid environments in which digital platforms, algorithmic systems and data architectures shape the conditions for health decisively as housing, workplaces or neighborhoods. This commentary argues that reimagining the Charter requires applying its five structural action areas—building healthy public policy, creating supportive environments, strengthening community action, developing personal skills and reorienting health services—to the hybrid settings of a rapidly transforming everyday life. The digital determinants of health have become vectors of inequity: shaping information access, social connection, economic participation and self-determination. A Charter reimagined in 2026 must treat the digital environment as a determinant of health that demands the same structural and political response as the physical and social environments addressed by the original Charter.