The Social Implications of Technology Diffusion: Uncovering the Unintended Consequences of People’s Health-Related Mobile Phone Use in Rural India and China

Marco Haenssgen and Proochista Ariana

World Development, 2017, vol. 94, issue C, 286-304

Abstract: After three decades of mobile phone diffusion, thousands of mobile-phone-based health projects worldwide (“mHealth”), and hundreds of thousands of smartphone health applications, fundamental questions about the effect of phone diffusion on people’s healthcare behavior continue to remain unanswered. This study investigated whether, in the absence of specific mHealth interventions, people make different healthcare decisions if they use mobile phones during an illness. Following mainstream narratives, we hypothesized that phone use during an illness (a) increases and (b) accelerates healthcare access.

Keywords: social implications of technology diffusion; mobile phones; healthcare access; India; China; mHealth (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X17300281
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:94:y:2017:i:c:p:286-304

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2017.01.014

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().