Wellness as Self-Governance: Digitalization, AI, and Indian Healthtech

The Indian health-care system, characterized by decreasing public funding and a rapidly increasing number of private health-care facilities, has awakened to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) – efforts are underway for aggregating innovations within a digital health architecture. Analyzing the emerging narrative around ‘smart’ wearable gadgets, healthtech platforms, and their chatbots, this article investigates the paradigm of wellness predicated upon tracking-based self-governance. It establishes that AI amplifies the suboptimal but continuous process in wellness, as opposed to traditional health care focused on addressing unfortunate medical events. While exploring the broader implications of the digital health architecture, the article argues that much of the enthusiasm about AI chatbots and wellness apps is not due to the quality of health-care support but, rather, to widespread curiosity about an always-on support system, which has not yet translated into the sort of triumph that the Indian state and venture capital are trying to attain.