An Embodied Ethical Framework for Digitally Mediated Healthcare: A Nursing-Phenomenological Perspective

The rapid expansion of digital health technologies-including telemedicine, wearable devices, and AI-driven diagnostics-has transformed healthcare practices by mediating how care is delivered, perceived, and experienced. While ethical debates in digital health often focus on data governance, privacy, and equitable access, less attention has been paid to digitally mediated healthcare as an embodied practice, particularly in nursing contexts. This article develops a nursing-phenomenological framework for digital health ethics by focusing on how digital technologies mediate patients' embodied experiences of illness and care. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the lived body, the analysis examines how digitally mediated care reshapes bodily schema, perception, and presence in clinical encounters. Integrating Don Ihde's postphenomenology, the article further shows how technologies actively mediate perception, co-constitute embodiment, and generate multiple stabilities that shape clinical interpretation, patient engagement, and nursing practice. The central claim is that digital health ethics must attend not only to abstract bioethical principles but also to the embodied and technologically mediated conditions under which care is experienced and enacted. By clarifying the experiential and technological dimensions of digitally mediated healthcare, this approach offers a situated ethical lens with practical implications for nursing practice, technological design, and health policy.