Health by numbers? Exploring the practice and experience of datafied health

ABSTRACT

The widespread availability of portable sensing devices has given rise to growing numbers of people voluntarily self-tracking their daily experiences through the medium of digital data. At the extreme end of this trend is the ‘Quantified Self’ movement. This collective uses sensor-enabled tech to extensively map aspects of their personal lives, before sharing procedural insights at community ‘show and tell’ events. A key aim of the group is to better understand imperceptible bodily processes, especially those influencing health states, as they are materialised through the datafied body. Despite the growth in those mobilising digital data for health management, little is known about the subjective meanings that are ascribed to self-monitoring practices. This paper explores how self-trackers conceptualise the data they generate, and how exteriorised bodily interiorities mediate impressions of embodiment. We suggest that the availability of self-tracked data has initiated interesting new relationships between data-subjects and their objectified bodies, dynamics that impact on how bodies are experienced and inhabited. We show how bodily intuition is being outsourced to, if not displaced by, the medium of ‘unbodied’ data. It is this objectivated facility that is increasingly used to orientate behavioural decisions as they relate to bodily maintenance.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-tracking
• subjectivity
• embodiment
• datafied health
• intuition
• knowledge

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the two reviewers and Deborah Lupton for their excellent and instructive comments on an earlier draft of this paper. We also wish to thank Norma Smith for her diligence in proofreading this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Gavin J. D. Smith http://orcid.org/0000-0002-0664-3694

Ben Vonthethoff http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3572-8179