Self-tracking, health and medicine

Self-tracking has featured as a central practice in health promotion and healthcare for centuries. People have paid attention to the details of their bodily functions and sensations, their diet, body weight, drug use and exercise habits, as part of attempting to achieve good health or manage illness and disease. Over the past few years, a fascination with self-tracking and its implications for concepts of self, identity, social relations and embodiment has emerged in sociological and other social research. This interest has partly sprung from increasing coverage in the mass media of the potential for new digital technologies to facilitate self-tracking in novel ways. The possibilities for new mobile media and apps to be used to monitor and measure human bodies have also been championed in medical publications (Swan, 2012; Topol, 2015). The 'quantified self to describe digital self-tracking has taken on particular cultural resonance. This term first emerged in 2007, when two Wired magazine editors, Kevin Kelly and Gary Wolf invented it to describe behaviours that they had observed among colleagues and friends involving the use of digital technologies such as apps and wearable devices to generate detailed personal information about their bodies and elements of their everyday lives. They began organising meetings of people interested in self-tracking and eventually launched a website: The Quantified Self. The quantified self term soon began to appear in the mass media, helped by articles and blog posts penned by Wolf and Kelly for Wired and other influential media like The New York Times. It began to supplant the older 'lifelogging', which had attracted research interest since the emergence of personal computing, particularly among human-computer interaction (HCI) researchers (Lupton, 2013). In response to these developments, a body of literature from social researchers has rapidly developed, with at least two books (Lupton, 2016a; Neff & Nafus, 2016) and two edited book collections (Nafus, 2016; Selke, 2016) appearing in 2016. Numerous articles and book chapters about self-tracking have been published since 2012 (for reading lists, see Lupton, 2016b, 2016c). Self-tracking is not always about health and medical issues, but these are key elements. People who engage in reflexive self-monitoring collect information about themselves, and reflect on how this information can be used to improve their lives in some way. These data are often about their bodies and health states: their medical symptoms and medical treatments, sleeping, eating, alcohol and drug use and exercising habits, body weight, blood glucose levels, pulse, moods and stress levels and reproductive and sexual functioning and activities.While many people engage in self-tracking using non-digital forms of recording their details, such as pen-and-paper or even just relying on their memories (Fox & Duggan, 2013), a vast array of digital technologies have come onto the market that can be used for highly detailed and often automated self-monitoring. There are now over 160,000 health and medical apps on the market, and apps for counting calories, fitness tracking and menstrual cycle tracking are among the most popular in terms of downloads (IMS Institute for Healthcare Informatics, 2015). Wearable devices such as Fitbit, Jawbone Up and Misfit, as well as smartwatches like Apple Watch, have been designed to feature self-tracking sensors and software that can monitor and measure health and bodily movements. Patients with chronic diseases like diabetes, mental health conditions and high blood pressure can use mobile self-monitoring devices and apps to engage in self-care. Patient support platforms such as PatientsLikeMe encourage people to monitor their symptoms and treatments and share these data with others. Exergaming devices like Wii Fit and Kinect Xbox include digital sensors that can monitor and record players' physical activities. Some game apps not obviously directed at self-tracking, such as Pokemon Go, now often include a physical activity monitor as part of the gamification of preventive health. …