Caring for the Person's Mirror: The Entrustment of the Data-Person as a Nursing Theory for the Algorithmic Age

Health data are born of a person's lived reality and carry that reality with them. They inhabit the systems that receive them, they feed the algorithms that learn from them, and they outlive the encounter in which they were produced. Nursing has begun to theorise its own side of this scene, from technological competency to frameworks for responsible artificial intelligence; the side of the person whose data have departed remains theoretically unattended. This essay proposes the Theory of the Entrustment of the Data-Person. Its founding act is the entrustment. Handing over one's need for care at a stage of vulnerability hands over body, history and data together, and the obligation of care travels with the data wherever they go. From within the relational ethics of care, the essay develops the theory by answering the ontological question (what a data-person is, namely value, origin and biographical bond, belonging to the person and partly constituting her), the metaphysical question (what remains after death, the echoes and the mirror composed of them, a consent that becomes a last will, and a guardian who answers when the source is silent), the epistemic question (what a professional can honestly promise, namely a stepped custody, an organisational duty to disclose, and a duty of awareness in generalisation), the ethical question (why the obligation is enforceable rather than charitable, and why a duty succeeds where new rights would fail, since a right requires a claimant and a duty only an obligated party) and the methodological question (why a theory born at the bedside is legitimate nursing philosophy). The implications propose a three-layer architecture of consent: one may refuse the mirror, not the census. The discipline that manages care, whose object is the person, already occupies the custodian's post in fact. What remained was to name it.