Exploring the Direct and Indirect Environmental Impacts of Mobile Health: Glucose Monitoring:

A: Augustin Wattiez, Université Catholique de Louvain,ICTEAM/ECS,Louvain-la-Neuve,Belgium
A: Rémi Dekimpe, Université Catholique de Louvain,ICTEAM/ECS,Louvain-la-Neuve,Belgium
A: Thibault Pirson, Université Catholique de Louvain,ICTEAM/ECS,Louvain-la-Neuve,Belgium
A: David Bol, Université Catholique de Louvain,ICTEAM/ECS,Louvain-la-Neuve,Belgium
ICT increasingly supports healthcare through mobile health (mHealth) technologies. The prevailing narrative in the literature suggests that mHealth improves healthcare efficiency while reducing its environmental footprint. However, there is (1) an important lack of studies assessing the direct environmental impacts of mHealth technologies and (2) a lack of consideration of the indirect environmental impacts resulting from their integration into healthcare systems and society. Hence, the effective potential of mHealth in reducing healthcare’s footprint remains speculative. To help address this gap, this paper explores the premise of a multi-level framework for assessing the comprehensive environmental impacts of mHealth technologies. This is illustrated with the case study of continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) devices, a representative example of mHealth technologies. First, the focus is on their direct environmental impacts, which are estimated through a comparative life-cycle assessment considering several scenarios. Results show that CGM devices exhibit higher direct impacts than the monitoring solution they aim to replace by a factor of 1.1x to 5x, depending on the impact category. Only scenarios that extend CGM device lifetime show significant impact reductions. Second, this paper points out relevant tools such as augmented decision models from health economics and causal loop diagrams from systems thinking to account for the indirect environmental impacts of CGM devices and other mHealth technologies.

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