Abstract

The article provides an overview of the sociological literature on users' involvement in health care. It discusses how users' involvement has been conceptualized by most eminent scholars in regard to the central issue of empowerment. Two different streams of research are then presented that we have defined as the «voluntarist route» and the «technological» one. We will focus on the latter in more detail, not only because it has been recently developed, but also because empowerment and engagement are frequently recalled, yet not enough problematised, in the rhetoric on digital health.