Self-tracking Practices Research Articles

Living the metrics: Self-tracking and situated objectivity.

This paper evaluates self-tracking practices in connection with ideas of objectivity via exploration of confrontations with personal data, particularly with reference to physiological stress and recovery measurements. The discussion departs from the notion of ‘mechanical objectivity’, seeking to obtain evidence that is ‘uncontaminated by interpretation’. The framework of mechanical objectivity tends, however, to fall short when people translate physiological measurements to fit their expectations and everyday experiences. We develop the concept of ‘situated objectivity’ with the goal of highlighting the everyday as a domain of interpretation, reflection and ambiguity, proposing that the concept offers an analytical entry point to a more profound understanding of how people engage with their personal data. Everyday data encounters are not methodical and systematic, but combine knowledge in an eclectic manner. Framed in this way, self-tracking practices are less occupied with ‘facts of life’ than translating and transforming life based on earlier experiences, cultural understandings and shared expectations. Paradoxically, new measurement devices and software, which are supposed to be based on sound, universal and generalisable principles, hard facts and accurate descriptions, become raw material for daily decisions, as people seek bespoke answers and craft personalised theories of health and life. From this perspective, self-tracking measurements can be used to experiment and learn, gaining value in relation to the communicative processes that they promote and contributing to possibilities for rethinking health knowledge and health promotion.

Clinical self-tracking and monitoring technologies: negotiations in the ICT-mediated patient–provider relationship

ABSTRACTThis paper discusses mediation in the patient–provider relationship arising from the introduction of digital technology for a specific form of monitoring: ‘clinical self-tracking’. Focusing on the management of type 1 diabetes, a condition that requires significant self-management by patients, we describe how the actors negotiated a new ICT-mediated relationship in three hospital departments. The analysis followed a qualitative design and was carried out by interviewing patients, clinicians and technology developers and by analysing messages exchanged through the ICT tool. We first show how each department customised the system by drawing on already existing care practices, organisational goals and representations of the department’s desired relationship with the patients. We then focus on patient–provider relationships, showing that, while the clinical self-tracking sometimes followed the path desired by the providers, at other times, it developed in unexpected ways. We distinguish among three emerging categories of self-tracking: self-tracking for remote management, self-tracking for e-learning and self-tracking as boundary setting. The analysis reveals how the new patient–provider relationship arises from an open-ended process. Providers can push self-tracking practices but cannot steer them; and patients, through an unexpected use of the self-tracking technologies, are able to negotiate a desired relationship with providers.

Self-Tracking: Reflections from the BodyTrack Project.

Based on the author's experiences the practice of self-tracking can empower individuals to explore and address issues in their lives. This work is inspired by examples of people who have reclaimed their wellness through an iterative process of noticing patterns of ups and downs, trying out new ideas and strategies, and observing the results. In some cases, individuals have realized that certain foods, environmental exposures, or practices have unexpected effects for them, and that adopting custom strategies can greatly improve quality of life, overcoming chronic problems. Importantly, adopting the role of investigator of their own situation appears to be transformative: people who embarked on this path changed their relationship to their health situation even before making discoveries that helped lead to symptom improvement. The author co-founded the BodyTrack project in 2010 with the goal of empowering a broader set of people to embrace this investigator role in their own lives and better address their health and wellness concerns, particularly those with complex environmental or behavioral components. The core of the BodyTrack system is an open source web service called Fluxtream ( https://fluxtream.org ) that allows users to aggregate, visualize, and reflect on data from myriad sources on a common timeline. The project is also working to develop and spread peer coaching practices to help transfer the culture and skills of self-tracking while mentoring individuals in how to self-assess their own situation and guide the process for themselves.

From data fetishism to quantifying selves: Self-tracking practices and the other values of data

This article foregrounds the ways in which members of the Quantified Self ascribe value and meaning to the data they generate in self-tracking practices. We argue that the widespread idea that what draws self-trackers to numerical data is its perceived power of truth and objectivity—a so-called “data fetishism”—is limiting. Using an ethnographic approach, we describe three ways in which self-trackers attribute meaning to their data-gathering practices which escape this data fetishist critique: self-tracking as a practice of mindfulness, as a means of resistance against social norms, and as a communicative and narrative aid. In light of this active engagement with data, we suggest that it makes more sense to view these practitioners as “ quantifying selves.” We also suggest that such fine-grained accounts of the appeal that data can have, beyond its allure of objectivity, are necessary if we are to achieve a fuller understanding of Big Data culture.

An Interdisciplinary Approach on the Mediating Character of Technologies for Recognizing Human Activity

In this paper, we introduce a research project on investigating the relation of computers and humans in the field of wearable activity recognition. We use an interdisciplinary approach, combining general philosophical assumptions on the mediating character of technology with the current computer science design practice. Wearable activity recognition is about computer systems which automatically detect human actions. Of special relevance for our research project are applications using wearable activity recognition for self-tracking and self-reflection, for instance by tracking personal activity data like sports. We assume that activity recognition is providing a new perspective on human actions; this perspective is mediated by the recognition process, which includes the recognition models and algorithms chosen by the designer, and the visualization to the user. We analyze this mediating character with two concepts which are both based on phenomenological thoughts namely first Peter-Paul Verbeek’s theory on human-technology relations and second the ideas of embodied interaction. Embedded in the concepts is a direction which leads to the role of technical design in how technology mediates. Regarding this direction, we discuss two case studies, both in the possible using practice of self-tracking and the design practice. This paper ends with prospects towards a better design, how the technologies should be designed to support self-reflection in a valuable and responsible way.

Uncovering Everyday Rhythms and Patterns: Food tracking and new forms of visibility and temporality in health care.

This chapter demonstrates how ethnographically-oriented research on emergent technologies, in this case self-tracking technologies, adds to Techno-Anthropology's aims of understanding techno-engagements and solving problems that deal with human-technology relations within and beyond health informatics. Everyday techno-relations have been a long-standing research interest in anthropology, underlining the necessity of empirical engagement with the ways in which people and technologies co-construct their daily conditions. By focusing on the uses of a food tracking application, MealLogger, designed for photographing meals and visualizing eating rhythms to share with health care professionals, the chapter details how personal data streams support and challenge health care practices. The interviewed professionals, from doctors to nutritionists, have used food tracking for treating patients with eating disorders, weight problems, and mental health issues. In general terms, self-tracking advances the practices of visually and temporally documenting, retrieving, communicating, and understanding physical and mental processes and, by doing so, it offers a new kind of visual mediation. The professionals point out how a visual food journal opens a window onto everyday life, bypassing customary ways of seeing and treating patients, thereby highlighting how self-tracking practices can aid in escaping the clinical gaze by promoting a new kind of communication through visualization and narration. Health care professionals are also, however, acutely aware of the barriers to adopting self-tracking practices as part of existing patient care. The health care system is neither used to, nor comfortable with, personal data that originates outside the system; it is not seen as evidence and its institutional position remains insecure.

Self-tracking as communication

Self-tracking has attracted a lot of attention from researchers and public opinion makers owing to its potential for improving life conditions through preemptive action on health, and as a tool of user empowerment vis-à-vis health-care professionals and private and public institutions. Nevertheless, the ‘stuff’ that is typically tracked – exercise and diet being the dominant tracking activities – refers to cultural and social practices that, for the individual user, are utterly mundane and reside in an experiential realm of everyday life. Self-tracking has to be understood in relation to behavior that is predominantly about getting things done in ways that are possible, suitable and meaningful for the individual. To account for this, we propose to conceptualize self-tracking as a communicative phenomenon along three dimensions: communication with the system, the self and social networks of peers. We develop the theoretical framework, drawing upon empirical findings from a qualitative study on how self-tracking is practiced and experienced in the context of exercise by different categories of empirical users. We demonstrate that the meanings of self-tracking practices are, at once, shaped by the motivation of an individual user who is situated in a broader web of everyday activities, and stimulated and augmented by communicative features provided by the technology.

Broadcast Yourself: An Exploratory Study of Sharing Physical Activity on Social Networking Sites

This article focuses on the practice of self-tracking of physical activity data and sharing it via social networking sites. The use of wearable technology devices and the latest smartphones with built-in GPS tracking technology – capturing the speed, distance and duration of physical activities such as running and cycling – is a striking example of the trend towards quantifying sports performances. The study explores the determinants and motivations of recreational athletes to share physical activity status updates on the social networking sites Facebook and Twitter. Evidence is drawn from a large-scale survey of 400 users of Strava, a popular fitness app and online community. The results suggest that intrinsic rather than extrinsic motivations determine a person's willingness to share physical activity via social networking sites.

Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies

Mobile and wearable digital devices and related Web 2.0 apps and social media tools offer new ways of monitoring, measuring and representing the human body. They are capable of producing detailed biometric data that may be collected by individuals and then shared with others. Health promoters, like many medical and public health professionals, have been eager to seize the opportunities they perceive for using what have been dubbed ‘mHealth’ (‘mobile health’) technologies to promote the public’s health. These technologies are also increasingly used by lay people outside the professional sphere of health promotion as part of voluntary self-tracking strategies (referred to by some as the ‘quantified self’). In response to the overwhelmingly positive approach evident in the health promotion and self-tracking literature, this article adopts a critical sociological perspective to identify some of the social and cultural meanings of self-tracking practices via digital devices. Following an overview of the technologies currently available for such purposes, I move on to discuss how they may contribute to concepts of health, embodiment and identity. The discussion focuses particularly on how these technologies promote techno-utopian, enhancement and healthist discourses, and the privileging of the visual and metric in representing the body via these devices.