Towards multidimensional taxonomy of phygital healthcare

Healthcare is among the fields affected by the ongoing phygital transformation, as the diffusion of sensing technologies, artificial intelligence, robotics, and immersive environments progressively reshapes how care is delivered, practised, and learned. Yet what phygital healthcare actually is remains unclear: it circulates across a fragmented body of knowledge in which systems are described one at a time and classified by device type or medical specialty, with no shared way of defining the phygital condition or of distinguishing the ways physical and digital components integrate. This dissertation asks what defines the phygital condition in healthcare, and which conceptual dimensions are necessary to describe and differentiate the ways in which physical and digital components integrate within hybrid healthcare environments. Its central premise is that the phygital is not a property of technologies but a condition that systems achieve through the way physical and digital components are configured and brought into relation, so that it is understood not as a binary attribute but as a relational and gradient condition, existing in degrees and taking different configurations across systems. Grounded in a design-oriented perspective, the research develops its principal contribution inductively from a corpus of thirty-six phygital healthcare systems, analysed through the Nickerson-Varshney-Muntermann method for taxonomy development. The result is a multidimensional taxonomy organised around the ways in which physical and digital components integrate within a healthcare system, articulated across six dimensions and two complementary descriptive layers, and operationalised as an open, interactive, web-based platform through which the field can be navigated and compared. The dissertation thereby reframes phygital healthcare as a designed, relational, and graded condition, rather than a property established by the mere presence of physical and digital components, and offers a conceptual, an analytical, and an operational contribution to its understanding. The phygital, understood not as the coexistence of physical and digital elements but as the designed and graded relation between them, thereby becomes an object that can be analysed, compared, evaluated, and designed.