When Knowing Fails to Heal: Rethinking Digital Health Beyond the Interface

Abstract

What does “digital health” mean for a generation of young researchers who are both the subjects and architects of the digital turn in health communication？ The poster interrogates four dominant paradigms — the Information Deficit Model, the Knowledge–Attitude–Practice framework, Health Literacy, and Nudging. I reframe digital health not as a set of tools, but as a governance problem that encodes assumptions about who acts, who decides, and who benefits. For young scholars entering this space, digital health is more than a field of study; it is the environment in which our own intellectual labour, identity, and agency are being shaped.

The poster highlights how the speed and abundance of digital scholarship parallel the acceleration and fragmentation of health information itself. Both reveal a tension between “fast and many” outputs and “slow and few” understandings. Positioned within this tension, emerging researchers must navigate a landscape where digital technologies promise empowerment but often reproduce inequities. Our voices, whether expressed through critique, co-design, or reflexive practice, are crucial for redefining what counts as evidence, participation, and care in an age of algorithmic mediation.

In this context, digital health becomes a space where young researchers learn to exercise judgement: to recognise when technologies enable meaningful understanding, and when we flatten lived experience into data points. Rather than taking prevailing models at face value, we are invited to articulate our own criteria for good research and fair design. This means asking not only whether digital interventions work, but for whom, under what conditions, and at what cost. For many of us, developing a research voice is inseparable from developing a stance toward digital systems, one that values depth over speed, context over convenience, and equity over technical elegance. By engaging digital health on these terms, we take part in shaping a more thoughtful and inclusive research culture for our generation.