Video consultations and health applications have been transforming our experiences of care. Yet what kind of encounter takes place at the moment when healthcare professionals and patients begin to share a space shaped by digital video interfaces?
We can increasingly observe our experiences of healthcare being mediated through screens. Video consultations, monitoring applications, and clinical follow-up platforms form part of a reality that has been changing our relationship with health services, expanding opportunities for access and introducing new forms of interaction between professionals and patients.
As we reflect on these transformations, however, questions arise that extend beyond how the devices function. At the moment we seek care, we bring with us a personal history, expectations, fears, and interpretations of what we are experiencing, rather than merely a clinical condition that fits neatly into a standardized category. The symptoms we report are part of that experience, although the meanings we attribute to illness frequently involve aspects of our lives that would be difficult to understand solely through clinical indicators.
We might imagine, for example, someone seeking medical attention because of recurring pain. When completing a digital form, this person encounters fields for the location, intensity, and frequency of symptoms. Such information is necessary for clinical assessment, yet their greatest concern may be the fear of developing a particular disease, the memory of a family experience, or the difficulties that pain has been creating in everyday relationships. The particular features of their experience, however, will not always find a corresponding option in the system.
What is at stake in these situations is the fact that every illness and every trauma carries a lived experience, a unique history that shapes and modulates it. This led me to question the nature of the digital spaces we are constructing for care.
The French anthropologist Marc Augé developed the concept of the non-place to understand certain contemporary spaces characterized by predominantly functional relationships, patterns of circulation, and situations of anonymity. Airports and supermarkets, among others, exemplify these non-places: spaces of transit in which we can observe how certain experiences are organized around procedures, forms of identification, and general rules of use.
Bringing this reflection closer to health technologies allows us to examine the conditions under which a digital platform might foster recognition, a sense of being welcomed, and the formation of bonds, as well as those circumstances in which relationships would tend to be organized primarily according to the operational demands of the system, thus taking on the character of non-places.
A consultation mediated through a screen may become a space for attentive listening and human closeness, a place, depending on the conditions in which it occurs. Similarly, a platform equipped with sophisticated technological resources may produce impersonal experiences when the communicative needs of those involved find little room for expression, assuming the character of a non-place.
The distinction between place and non-place thus helps us understand that the quality of the relationships established in these environments depends on various factors, including the organization of technologies, professional practices, and users’ own experiences.
This discussion forms part of my essay, Telessaúde e aplicativos de saúde como lugares e não-lugares digitais: educação em saúde e o desafio da escuta mediada (Telehealth and Health Applications as Digital Places and Non-Places: Health Education and the Challenge of Mediated Listening), published in October 2026 in RECIIS, a journal of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz). In it, I propose understanding digital health environments as cultural spaces whose meanings take shape through the relationships we establish within them.
Perhaps the question we should consider concerns how these technologies are taking part in the construction of our experiences of care and under what conditions we are able to transform them into environments in which the presence of others can be recognized.
After all, when we reflect on spaces devoted to healthcare, we are also considering the conditions under which people will be able to share their experiences, express their suffering, and find recognition.
About this publication
This is the first text in a science communication series based on my essay published on October 9, 2026, in RECIIS, a journal of the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz).
Scientific reference
ARANHA, Glaucio. Telessaúde e aplicativos de saúde como lugares e não-lugares digitais: educação em saúde e o desafio da escuta mediada. RECIIS, Rio de Janeiro, v. 20, e5128, 2026.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.29397/reciis.v20.5128
Read the full research article: https://www.reciis.icict.fiocruz.br/index.php/reciis/article/view/5128
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