“Find Your Fit”: Wearable technology and the cultural politics of disability

Abstract

By examining advertisements, technological design, workplace wellness programs, and legal discourses involving Fitbit activity trackers, this article examines how cultural ideas about disability infuse the representation, use, study, and implementation of wearable technology. Although Fitbit features wheelchair users prominently in advertising, Fitbit only measures movements in steps, and its use in workplace wellness programs has been accompanied by legal concerns about wellness programs’ potential weakening of workplace protections afforded to US workers by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act (GINA). This article shows that inspirational and tragic representations of disability work to depoliticize wearable technology and argues that disability needs to be a more central category of analysis for cultural studies and sociological studies of the cultural impacts of fitness tracking and wellness culture.