Public Health Technologies: AI, (Mental) Health, and the Governance Gap

Digital tools are increasingly the first point of contact in health care. AI powered chatbots, symptom checkers, apps, and platforms now offer immediate, low threshold support to people seeking information, advice, and care, often while they wait for professional services. These systems are promoted as answers to workforce shortages, long waits, and barriers to access. They also carry real risks. Digital tools can give unsafe advice, fail in urgent situations, reinforce bias, and shift responsibility for health onto individuals. They do not simply supplement care. They reshape how health support is accessed and experienced, across mental health, chronic disease, reproductive and sexual health, nutrition, and beyond.

This session examines these dynamics internationally and asks what it would mean to recognize a right to digital health, understood as the right to health applied in digital environments, requiring that technologies are accessible, safe, equitable, and accountable. We invite empirical and theoretical papers that explore how digital health interacts with existing inequities, and social & governance systems to shape how health is governed and experienced. We particularly welcome examinations of the limits of existing digital health governance; the role of corporate technology firms in digital health governance; the value and risks of digital tools in health practices, particularly for vulnerable users; and how a rights based approach to digital governance may look.

The session welcomes a variety of methodology and approaches from sociology, public health, law, and science and technology studies.