Am I a cyborg because I wear health monitoring technology?

This week’s blog post reviews the paper “Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies” by Deborah Lupton. This paper was very interesting to me personally as it gives context to wearable health tracking technology, an area of which I have only just recently delved into with the purchase of a FitBit last week!

The paper firstly defines what the concept of ‘self-tracking’ and ‘the quantified self’ is giving examples of wearable and app technology such as the previously mentioned FitBit, Nike + Fuelband and Zeo Personal Sleep Coach. The underlying idea behind these technologies is that they offer a person the ability to log personal activities, vital signs and bodily behaviour such as calorie intake, steps taken, heart rate, amount of sleep as well as offering personalised reminders and informal advice based on data that was input manually or scraped from sensors embedded within the physical device. The author makes the connection of how using these devices as bodily interpreters can be considered as a step towards viewing the body as somewhat of a cyborg. The author clarifies her interpretation of a cyborg within this context by explaining that it is not the same as those who commit to permanent body modification such as cosmetic surgery to implement magnets, RFID or lighting within a human body.

The author highlights a vast number of potential problems with these devices and applications. Sustainability of user interest, excessive competitiveness and over-monitoring are some of the common traits associated with these technologies. The availableness of personal data prompts initial interest for the user and then, once user goals have been established and met, the user loses interest and does not continue to use the technology rendering it unsustainable and ineffective in the long term vision of improving the user’s health.  One theory voiced by the author within the article, which I want to completely disagree with, discusses how people may become more reliant on the data as a source of ‘how their body is doing’ at any one point; this implies that a person would disregard real pain, symptoms and distress if their choice of monitoring technology implied they were in ‘good stable health’. I can envision it happening to some extent however common sense (I hope) would take over at this point – perhaps I am not thinking as far ahead as the author on this occasion but at the moment I think the general length of use associated with this kind of technology ultimately means this wouldn’t happen; but then again, I could be wrong, and probably am, as research into long term use of these technologies has not been undertaken as of yet. The area of wearable health monitoring technology definitely has the potential to be a very interesting area of research due to the vast amount of areas yet to be explored.

I find myself more inclined to support the authors views presented within the paper despite the very minor statement regarding over reliance on this kind of technology. Why? Because I do believe there is a market for this kind of technology. If it gives people motivation, the drive or, any reason at all to go out and exercise and consider their own health as a priority for self-monitoring, surely it must be beneficial in some way.

Drawing on the aspect of how health monitoring (or MHealth) is viewed as being temporary or a niche piece of technology that only serves the purpose of prompting users into self help monitoring; I have chosen to read the article “Why we use and abandon smart devices” to explore this phenomenon deeper to see if it is applicable to alternative ‘smart’ devices outside of health monitoring to see if there is a similar trend.