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

The age of mHealth and the quantified-self is upon us. Web connected mobile devices are widely adopted, and with them a whole host of wearable technologies and apps which allow us to measure nearly every aspect of our physical lives. This, Deborah Lupton argues, is widely perceived as the main cause of the prophesised health care revolution, ‘brought by the patient herself as she uses her phone for self-tracking’.

There is no denying the potential of the quantified-self movement for changing health care, but according to Lupton, we must adopt a critical perspective and take a proper look at the implications of this shift. The increasing use of technology to gain perspectives on our bodies and health is entwined with issues of the cyborg, healthism, techno-utopian visions, privacy, ethics and more. There is a lack of a proper critical understanding of these issues Lupton asserts, and then lays foundations for possible fruitful future enquiry.

Techno-utopianism conceives mHealth technologies as keys of to the promotion of human happiness and wellbeing. The idea here is that a deeper understanding of our physical selves will allow us to control and improve our bodies, to smooth and remove defects, to counter degeneration and decay. Healthism, is the placing of moral value on being responsible for our own health. Here it is a good moral person who closely monitors their own health. Healthism, it is argued, is promoted and supported by mHealth technologies and their manufacturers.

The paper goes on to discuss the role of self-quantifying technologies in the shift of trust from haptic to optic feedback as being the most reliable form of understanding our own bodies. In the long tradition of medical imaging, we come to trust the ‘objectivity of numbers’ over our own physical sensations. They provide a glimpse into the unknowableness of our bodies, and make them knowable and in turn ‘manageable’.

Lupton concludes that there many ways of thinking about these technologies, which in the majority are unexplored. Talking about how the domestication of mHealth tech changes how we use and view technology and our bodies in turn, she calls for more exploration on these unacknowledged implications. Furthermore, she cites a number of conceptions of mHealth that may lead to increased anxiety, pressure and self-hate in users, not to mention a gap in the proper study of how these technologies can be effectively used by health promoters and professionals.

Prior to reading this paper, I had not considered the scope of personal informatics and health properly, and now agree that we need a better understanding of how mHealth is shifting our relationships with our bodies and the implications of this for health practice. It is hard to criticise a paper which makes few assertions, but casts a wide net over an issue, encapsulating and articulating a number of different views and perspectives. But I look forward to reading more about these issues, in particular the relationship with healthism.

I chose the paper, Gaze guided object recognition using a head-mounted eye tracker

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2168570&CFID=565064928&CFTOKEN=53532890

mainly because I’ve been involved in similar projects in museums and am very critical of them for providing insight into museum curation etc.