The Web-Rhetoric of Companies Offering Home-Based Personal Health Monitoring

In this paper I investigate the web-rhetoric of companies offering home-based personal health monitoring to patients and elderly people. Two main rhetorical methods are found, namely a reference to practical benefits and a use of prestige words like “quality of life” and “independence”. I interpret the practical benefits in terms of instrumental values and the prestige words in terms of final values. I also reconstruct the arguments on the websites in terms of six different types of argument. Finally, I articulate a general critique of the arguments, namely that the websites neglect the context of use of personal health monitoring technologies. Whether or not a technology is good depends on the use of the technology by a particular individual in a particular context. The technology is not good–or bad–in itself. I support this critique with a number of more specific arguments such as the risk for reduced personal contact. For some elderly people social contact with care providers is more valuable than the independent living made possible by remote monitoring, for others independence is more important.