With psychiatry lagging behind other medical fields in terms of innovation in instruments and methods, AI provides it an opportunity to catch up. Advocates of digital phenotyping promise to provide an objective tool that detects symptoms by analysing data from personal devices. We argue that digital phenotyping requires a more reflexive and critical approach to its design and an alignment of the clinicians’ interests in generating relevant evidence with the needs of service users who seek tools to manage their condition. We propose a felt informatics approach, situating digital phenotyping design within the problem space of pragmatist aesthetics. Within this perspective, felt life becomes a central object and a site for digital phenotyping design. This paper reveals the ways diagnostic data mediates mental ill health experience, emphasises the cultivation of aesthetic sensibility as a fundamental element of digital phenotyping and includes design considerations for practitioners and researchers.

Narratives about Big Data and AI (artificial intelligence) embedded themselves in the collective imaginary of the future—the future that is aspirational and desirable. These discourses are infused with technosolutionist and techno-optimistic argumentation, where digital transformation and technological intervention are seen as the most appropriate tools to address—if not “fix”— current social, economic, and environmental problems. As much as science and technology studies scholars attempt to popularize anti-deterministic framing, the myth of AI as a disembodied, ubiquitous, and autonomous actor, which shapes our present and future, prevails.

Emergent technology of digital phenotyping (DP) for mental health promises to serve as a window to the lived experiences of patients through the collection and analysis of passive and interaction data from personal mobile devices and wearables. However, the need for standardization, formalization, and interoperability requires DP algorithms to employ generalizable digital biomarkers that convert culturally and socially specific expressions of health, well-being, and illness into uniform, detectable, and quantifiable measurements. Authors critical of DP usually employ ethical and epistemological critique, which often either delegating responsibility or provide limited suggestions. Design and HCI are notably lacking from these conversations and practices. I argue that pragmatic aesthetics, which is focused on experience and perception, could be a generative bridge between philosophy and design for DP. Moreover, newly emerged aesthetics of care could be conducive to developing a more beneficial sensibility of how posthuman (i.e. algorithmic) care could support people with mental distress. These aesthetic theories are inherently intersubjective, thus requiring establishing new collaborative alliances between doctors, patients, and technologies, as well as cultivating new care practices and mind-body-technology relations.