Self-Tracking

Abstract

What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they become part of. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus describe what happens when people turn their everyday experience—in particular, health and wellness-related experience—into data, and offer an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of using these technologies. They consider self-tracking as a social and cultural phenomenon, describing not only the use of data as a kind of mirror of the self but also how this enables people to connect to, and learn from, others. Neff and Nafus consider what's at stake: who wants our data and why; the practices of serious self-tracking enthusiasts; the design of commercial self-tracking technology; and how self-tracking can fill gaps in the healthcare system. Today, no one can lead an entirely untracked life. Neff and Nafus show us how to use data in a way that empowers and educates.

Smart textiles: transforming the practice of medicalisation and health care

“…Drawing on personal experiences with birth and infants as well as use of OTC monitoring devices, participants pushed back on what Natasha Schull (2016) calls “data for life.” For Schull (, p.319), data for life are “a related, complimentary response to the notion that we are all potentially sick in which wellness depends on the continuous collection, analysis and management of personal data through digital sensor technologies.” Health, no longer simply the state of being free of disease, has become something that must be monitored and cultivated (Dumit ). The availability and use of health tracking digital devices is increasing as more people monitor their mental, emotional and bodily processes (Lupton ,b, Neff and Nafus ). Although the portability and design of smart textiles offer the potential of joining these two markets, participants greatly resisted this move, challenging the wisdom of the further production of anxious parents, an increased workload for clinicians and interventions that had no evidence of positive impact on outcomes.…”

From Nonclinical Research to Clinical Trials and Patient-registries: Challenges and Opportunities in Biomedical Research

“…The development of novel electronic tools for collecting standardized, patient-reported outcomes will be invaluable. 82,83 …”

Walk This Way: Fitbit and Other Kinds of Walking in Palestine

“…Walking is of course known to every culture, but only recently has walking become envisioned as an activity to be divided into steps, quantified, and-importantly-recorded by technologies attached to the body. A classically Maussian, nondiscursive technique of the body (see Mauss 1973) has become a discursive technique in its cyborgian manifestation: walking while recording has turned into a topic for discussion, a point of comparison and surveillance of the kind that concerns academic observers (Whitson 2014;Lupton 2016;Nafus 2016;Neff and Nafus 2016). These critical scholars have a point about self-tracking: the frightening possibilities of people reduced to quantifications (heart rates, glucose levels, blood pressure, calories consumed, pounds gained).…”

“…I have had colleagues who refuse to go for a walk if they have forgotten their cell phones and ones who have returned home to get their Fitbits so they wouldn't "waste" a day of not counting their steps. Gina Neff and Dawn Nafus (2016) also had interlocutors who reported distress without their Fitbits, as their emotions became imbricated with the technology. "The data," Neff and Nafus (2016,76) argue, "become a 'prosthetic of feeling,' something to help us sense our bodies or the world around us."…”

“…Although classic works of ethnomethodology (e.g., Ryave and Schenken 1974) ignored these wider cultural contexts, there is an enduring relevance in their brilliant eye for detail around the embodied ways people conduct themselves and interpret the actions of others through the minutiae of their bodily comportment. More recently, the burgeoning self-quantification literature (Lupton 2016;Nafus 2016;Neff and Nafus 2016;Ruckenstein and Schüll 2017;Schüll 2017) exhibits a tension between the potential for self-surveillance to gain positive control over oneself (women co-opting information and tactics of reproductive control for their own personal and political projects) and a concern over the use of self-surveillance data for the benefit of others (doctors, corporations, governments) or the potential of this data to have unintended consequences when it is revealed. Strava, a website and mobile app that allows users to share and compete with others through logging their athletic activity, published a heat map representing the activities of its users in November 2017.…”