How health-tracking apps frame individual responsibility and prevention

This study examines health-tracking apps and preventive responsibility in public health by treating digital health apps not as neutral tools, but as instruments through which health is governed. Drawing on Foucault’s concept of governmentality, it explores how user-facing messages encourage self-surveillance by asking individuals to monitor, assess and improve their bodies and routines. Apps thus help produce users as responsible health subjects. Latour’s STS perspective places apps, algorithms, data and interfaces within socio-technical networks that shape preventive practices. The study asks how health-tracking apps define responsibility for health, how they communicate prevention, and whether responsibility is presented mainly as a personal duty or as something formed through socio-technical relations. It is based on qualitative content analysis of official materials published by app developers. These materials were coded thematically and interpreted through governmentality and STS. The findings suggest that health apps present health as an individualised, measurable and continuously optimised process, tied to self-discipline, goal setting and behavioural adjustment. Users are invited to treat the body as data and everyday choices as risk management. Responsibility is organised through sensors, algorithms, notifications, dashboards, goals and recommendations. A key tension emerges: while apps shape health practices, they often distance themselves from medicine, leaving interpretation and health decisions largely to users. Overall, health apps communicate health as an individual obligation, yet in practice organise it as a distributed outcome of relations between users, data, devices and interfaces. Combining Foucault and Latour avoids two simplifications: that apps merely shift responsibility onto individuals, or that they are neutral technologies. Instead, they produce self-disciplining subjects and act as socio-technical actors shaping preventive practices.

Key messages

• This study shows how health-tracking apps shape preventive responsibility by turning self-monitoring, data and everyday choices into forms of health governance.

• This study highlights that health apps are not neutral tools: they produce responsible users while organising prevention through data, devices and interfaces.