Affordances of mHealth technology and the structuring of clinic communication

ABSTRACTCareful examination of communicative outcomes of mHealth technology is critical for understanding its capacity to shape the clinical interview and structure clinic communication. Drawing on a communicative affordances framework and adopting a video-based inductive analytic approach, we extend the concept of actualizations. We do so by examining the in situ communicative actions afforded by a mHealth web interface utilized during medication titration interviews with parents of children beginning stimulant medication for ADHD. We find that the web interface served five broad communicative functions that provided opportunities for improving information accuracy and for rendering clinical reasoning transparent, while jeopardizing opportunities for parents to narrativize medication experiences. We discuss clinical, theoretical, and methodological implications.