Making sense of digital health data: Negotiating epistemological tensions of everyday eating in Singapore

Abstract

Engagements with personal digital data are growing in recent decades, as many digital technologies offer any interested user the opportunity to track their habits and practices. Yet, far from being objective and neutral conduits of knowledge, digital data is often politicised, invested with particular values, norms, and assumptions about human experiences. Digital health technologies, in particular, are often found to be coded through biomedical understandings of health and the individualism of Western ethics. Such politics of data knowledge inevitably has implications on the ways people in different socio-cultural contexts make sense of their health, bodies, and correspondingly, experience spaces of health through engagements with digital data. Drawing on diaries and diary-interviews with users of digital food-tracking devices in Singapore, this paper develops the idea of ‘epistemological tensions’ to theorise the socio-cultural differences in digital practices beyond the dominant focus on Anglo-American experiences. The findings suggest that people’s engagements with digital health technologies can be experienced as ‘glitchy’ and fraught with epistemological tensions, as they constantly position their healthy eating practices between algorithmic advice offered by these technologies, and the socio-cultural norms of health and eating that they subscribe to. In negotiating such tensions, people are also found to express agency that has spatial and temporal implications on their health practices. In sum, this paper underscores the importance of critically situating, instead of simply scrutinising, everyday geographies of datafication. Doing so can yield more contextually nuanced insight into the potential and limits of digital technologies in mediating health geographies in different social and cultural contexts.