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Copyright of Journal of Soochow University Philosophy & Social Sciences Edition is the property of Soochow University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article examines Nicholas Felton’s self-tracking project titled Annual Reports, which he carried out from 2005 to 2014. In each instalment, the author offers a visually appealing presentation of a selection of data pertaining to specific aspects of his daily life, such as work, food, drink, travel, music, photography, etc. This article aims to examine this work as an instance of data-driven autobiography—an experimental form of autobiography whose structure and content are determined by the empirical data that has been systematically gathered—and to consider its capacity to register various aspects of change in its author’s life, such as his work–play ratio, food and alcohol intake, and reading habits. The analysis is embedded in the context of a critical discussion about the quantified self (QS) movement and its positivist outlook on the possibility of enhancing one’s self-knowledge through a close engagement with personal data. The article argues that while Felton shares the belief in the revelatory nature of data, he resists the naivety associated with so-called dataism.

Background: For many trying to understand the sociology of technological artefacts and their influence in establishing human behaviour towards health, the study of m-Health applications becomes critical in the development of health and fitness behaviour among humans. M-Health is a growing field of study under ‘Social Construction of Technology (SCOT)’ wherein progress is witnessed in various categories such as the mobile application, developed to cater to the different needs of the digital health and fitness market.Methods: Through the scoping review under the broader category of a systematic literature review in the present paper, the aim is to understand the sociological construction and adoption of the health and fitness m-Health applications. For this purpose, the review contains peer-reviewed papers and articles, books, and other literature. These studies have been developed systematically and a comprehensive scope of further research that takes into account the contextual transformation of these m-Health applications has culminated.Results: To d evelop b etter c onceptual i nnovations, t he idea of quantified self and research gaps are highlighted. Further, a wider scope for quantifying oneself can be expanded for studies in a developing country like India. The idea of m-Health application has revolved around various categories that take into consideration the formative needs of healthcare in a developing as well as a developed world.Conclusion: Through this paper, we study the need to broaden the sociological lenses that comprehend the construction of these applications within the social context and how they are reshaping the behavioural patterns of health and fitness among individuals.

By enabling users to digitally monitor their health and behaviour, wearable technologies foster the perspective of the quantified self, a cultural phenomenon emphasising personal improvement through self-tracking. This vision, in turn, provides a basis for new forms of social engagement. In this netnographic study, we explore a brand community for users of the Fitbit wearable device. Our analysis reveals two structural dynamics – material agency and quantitative anchoring – which create a foundation for what we label 'accidental transhumanism', a transitional movement towards a transhumanist vision based on self-quantification, self-extension, and integration with technology. We further highlight the social engagement mechanisms, including motivating empowerment, friendly rivalry, and trusting engagement, that are built upon this foundation. Leveraging these findings, we theorise a novel model of the interaction of consumers and system artefacts in socio-technical assemblages. We refer to this novel phenomenon of brand community centred on self-quantification as quantified self-in-community, and consider both the beneficial and potentially deleterious impacts that it presents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this exploratory case study, we investigate how a collegiate esports team makes sense of gameplay data visualizations. Through our intervention we introduced the team to new data collection practices, provided data analysis and visualization support, and organized sensemaking sessions with the team to discuss implications of the analytics. Through an exploratory analysis of video footage, we identified three different sensemaking activities.

Citizen science allows the public to participate in various stages of scientific research, including study design, data acquisition, and data analysis. Citizen science has a long history in several fields of the natural sciences, and with recent developments in wearable technology, neuroscience has also become more accessible to citizen scientists. This development was largely driven by the influx of minimal sensing systems in the consumer market, allowing more do‐it‐yourself (DIY) and quantified‐self (QS) investigations of the human brain. While most subfields of neuroscience require sophisticated monitoring devices and laboratories, the study of sleep characteristics can be performed at home with relevant noninvasive consumer devices. The strong influence of sleep quality on waking life and the accessibility of devices to measure sleep are two primary reasons citizen scientists have widely embraced sleep research. Their involvement has evolved from solely contributing to data collection to engaging in more collaborative or autonomous approaches, such as instigating ideas, formulating research inquiries, designing research protocols and methodology, acting upon their findings, and disseminating results. In this article, we introduce the emerging field of citizen neuroscience, illustrating examples of such projects in sleep research. We then provide overviews of the wearable technologies for tracking human neurophysiology and various open‐source software used to analyse them. Finally, we discuss the opportunities and challenges in citizen neuroscience projects and suggest how to improve the study of the human brain outside the laboratory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Soochow University Philosophy & Social Sciences Edition is the property of Soochow University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Wearable technology (WT) use in organizations is accelerating despite ethical concerns about personal privacy, data security, and stress from increased surveillance. Technology media, a key producer of meanings about WT, gives some attention to these issues but they also routinely promote WT as if they are a panacea for employee wellness. We critically analyze 150 media articles to understand how they justify the adoption of WT into organizational life. We contribute by extending previous work on surveillance technology to show how and why WT media discourses use neo-liberal justifications to justify WT implementation. We explore implications including competing health and wellness discourses and make suggestions for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study aims to investigate the prevalence of individuals with disabilities who reported using wearable devices, to examine the association between wearable device usage and disability status, and to determine the characteristic of individuals with disabilities associated with wearable device usage using the 2017 Behavioural Risk Factor Surveillance System (BRFSS) through secondary data analysis. Data from the 2017 BRFSS of eight states were used in the analysis. Descriptive analysis, chi-square analysis, and multivariable logistic regressions were performed. Subsample analyses were also conducted for individuals with disabilities and different types of disability, including visual impairments, hearing impairments, cognitive disability, independent living disability, self-care disability, and mobility disability on wearable device usage. 14.6% (95% CI [11.7, 17.5]) of participants with disabilities were wearable device users. Individuals with disabilities were.63 (95% CI [.48,.83], p < 0.001) and.67 (95% CI [.50,.90], p = 0.007) times the odds of individuals without disabilities in using wearable devices, respectively, according to unadjusted and adjusted logistic regression. Individuals with mobility disability were less likely to utilise wearable devices than their counterparts. Among individuals with disabilities, those who were age 65 years or older had a lower odds of using wearable devices (OR =.55, 95% CI [0.35, 0.85), p = 0.007). Individuals with disabilities are using wearable devices in collecting various health-related information. Further research is needed to determine reasons why individuals with disabilities are not using wearable devices and how individuals with disabilities are using wearable devices. Wearable devices can track various health-related information such as physical activity levels, sleep patterns, calories intakes, and chronic health conditions. Using nationally represent data, individuals with disabilities have access and utilise wearable devices in free living setting. Compare to individuals without disabilities, individuals with disabilities are less likely to utilise wearable devices in free living setting. Further research is needed to determine the accessibility of wearable devices for individuals with disabilities and its usage in rehabilitation setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ObjectivesWearable fitness devices are increasingly being used by the general population, with many new applications being proposed for healthy adults as well as for adults with chronic diseases. Fewer, if any, studies of these devices have been conducted in healthy adolescents and teenagers, especially over a long period of time. The goal of this work was to document the successes and challenges involved in 5 years of a wearable fitness device use in a pediatric case study.Materials and methodsComparison of 5 years of step counts and minutes asleep from a teenaged girl and her father.ResultsAt 60 months, this may be the longest reported pediatric study involving a wearable fitness device, and the first simultaneously involving a parent and a child. We find step counts to be significantly higher for both the adult and teen on school/work days, along with less sleep. The teen walked significantly less towards the end of the 5-year study. Surprisingly, many of the adult's and teen's sleeping and step counts were correlated, possibly due to coordinated behaviors.DiscussionWe end with several recommendations for pediatricians and device manufacturers, including the need for constant adjustments of stride length and calorie counts as teens are growing.ConclusionWith periodic adjustments for growth, this pilot study shows these devices can be used for more accurate and consistent measurements in adolescents and teenagers over longer periods of time, to potentially promote healthy behaviors.

This study presents a quantitative account of who uses or stops using digital self-tracking (ST). A representative sample of German adults aged 20–50 years (N = 1022) completed an online survey on their ST practices, personality traits and attitudes toward numbers, on sociodemographic characteristics, mental disorders (particularly bulimia, burnout syndrome, and depression) and somatic disorders. A descriptive statistical analysis was performed on differences between self-trackers and non-trackers. Among others, they differ regarding age, civil status, social class, presence of mental and/or somatic diagnoses, performance-pressure, and strive for competition. A consequent binary logistic regression analysis suggests perfectionism, a somatic diagnosis within the last 5 years, a diagnosis of bulimia in the past, as well as a present mental diagnosis to be significant predictors for ST, though the predictive value of the factors was relatively low. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research community on the study and design of systems for personal informatics has grown over the past decade. To take stock of what the topics the field has studied and methods the field has used, we map and label 523 publications from ACM's library, IEEE Xplore, and PubMed. We surface that the literature has focused on studying and designing for health and wellness domains, an emphasis on understanding and overcoming barriers to data collection and reflection, and progressively fewer contributions involving artifacts being made. Our mapping review suggests directions future research could explore, such as identifying and resolving barriers to tracking stages beyond collection and reflection, engaging more with domain experts, and further discussing the privacy and ethical concerns around tracked data.

This article looks at the practices of quantified self to shed light on their ambiguities. These very diverse practices consist in using one or several applications on a smartphone or a connected object to quantify and measure an aspect of one’s life: number of steps taken per day, sports performance, health, etc. By mobilizing two fields of study composed of thirty comprehensive interviews with practitioners of quantified self as well as a thematic content analysis of messages sent on the MyFitnessPal forum (a calorie-tracking application), we will analyze how the transformation of daily activities into data presented as more objective can be a source of ambivalence for the individuals who engage in it. Following three empirical entries, this article will aim to show how the recording of ordinary experiences by digital devices can be a source of discrepancies between subjective representations and their digital transcriptions; how the sharing of these data on social networks and forums can be both a matter of experience sharing and participatory surveillance; and finally, to show how self-quantification by digital tools dialogues with the normative injunctions that users try to cope with.

This paper presents a literature review on the ethics of self-tracking technologies which are utilized by users to monitor parameters related to their activity and bodily parameters. By examining a total of 65 works extracted through a systematic database search and backwards snowballing, the authors of this review discuss three categories of opportunities and ten categories of concerns currently associated with self-tracking. The former include empowerment and well-being, contribution to health goals, and solidarity. The latter are social harms, privacy and surveillance, ownership control and commodification of data, autonomy, data-facilitated harm, datafication and interpretability of data, negative impact on relation to self and others, shortcomings of design, negative impact on health perception, and regulation and enforcement of rules. The review concludes with a critical analysis of the existing literature and an overview of a future research agenda that could complement the current work on ethics of self-tracking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores a specific – but highly plastic – activity-tracking platform. Marketed to parents, 'Milo Champions' encourages the monitoring and rewarding of children, based on their activities and behaviours. The platform incorporates a popular Australian food brand – Nestlé's Milo – and is designed for children aged between 6 and 12. Utilising walkthrough and software studies methodologies, the platform is traced by analysing app interfaces and online promotional material. Milo Champions is a niche example in the growing category of children's activity-tracking apps: one that wraps masculinised logics of self-tracking around a multitude of parenting practices and envisages them, being deployed through feminised practices of caregiving. This article adds to prescient discussions about the 'datafied child' of the 21st century, and how health and wellbeing informatics are entangled with corporate interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xiaowei Fan, Jun Fan, Jianglu Li School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou, People’s Republic of ChinaCorrespondence: Jun Fan, School of Business Administration, Zhejiang Gongshang University, 18 Xuezheng Street, Xiasha Higher Education District, Hangzhou, 310018, People’s Republic of China, Email fj@zjgsu.edu.cnPurpose: The COVID-19 pandemic has greatly influenced the health and lifestyles of individuals. Increasing numbers of consumers now participate in quantified self (QS) process to learn more about their health-related behaviors. Understanding how to increase consumers’ QS continuance participation intention is critical. Drawing on Social Cognitive Theory and Self-Construal Theory, this study investigates how the presentation characteristics of QS data and consumers’ self-construal can influence their continuance participation intention during QS process.Methods: Three between-subjects scenario simulation experiments were conducted to examine the influence mechanisms of the presentation mode and type of QS data and self-construal on consumers’ continuance participation intention.Results: The study found: (1) the presentation mode (horizontal comparison vs vertical comparison) and type (descriptive vs analytic) of QS data had significant interaction effects on consumers’ continuance participation intention; (2) consumers’ self-construal (interdependent vs independent) and the presentation mode of QS data had obvious interaction effects on their continuance participation intention; and (3) consumers’ self-construal and the presentation type of QS data had interaction influences on their continuance participation intention.Conclusion: This research combined Social Cognitive Theory and Self-Construal Theory to analyze the influence mechanisms of the presentation characteristics of QS data and consumers’ self-construal on their continuance participation intention. These findings not only expand the research field and the scope of application of Social Cognitive Theory, but also provide new insights for the study of consumers’ QS problems. They have reference value for the optimization of the presentation features of QS data, and for improving the match between QS data presentation and consumers’ self-construal types, to motivate continued participation in QS process.Keywords: continuance participation intention, data presentation, quantified self, self-construal

Depuis 2019, les « compétences numériques » dans les cursus scolaire et universitaire français sont enseignées au moyen de la plateforme en ligne Pix. L’étude de cette plateforme et de ses caractéristiques relevant de la gamification permet d’interroger les enjeux de ces nouvelles formes d’enseignement. Nous avons procédé à une enquête menée auprès de deux cohortes d’étudiants afin d’évaluer leurs modalités d’appropriation et d’observer leurs résultats, que nous avons pu comparer à des résultats en enseignement traditionnel. Les résultats de notre enquête permettent d’analyser les enjeux portés par la plateformisation gamifiée de l’enseignement dans la modification des contenus pédagogiques, dans la relation à l’autorité enseignante et dans la nouvelle posture apprenante.

Sleep studies suggest that exams, jobs, and technologies keep teens up at night, but little research exists to engage teens in reflecting on their own sleep. We designed a set of cards and a web-based app 'SleepBeta' to support reflection by inviting teens to ask questions, explore, track, and experiment with sleep and related technology and lifestyle habits. Through card sorting, we invited teens to identify technology and lifestyle habits they wished to track. SleepBeta let teens track various habits and sleep whilst visualizing interrelationships between these data. Twelve teens and 11 parents participated in interviews before and after a 3-week field trial of SleepBeta. Our findings highlighted four distinct modes of reflection: reflection in preparation, reflection in action, reflection upon revisiting data, and reflection through social interaction. We discuss how our findings provide sensitizing concepts that reframe reflection from a post hoc activity with personal data, to an ongoing process that starts before technologies are used to generate data. We highlight design opportunities for scaffolding reflection in preparation, and we reflect on design choices that give teens control over their data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objectification is a real problem in medicine that can lead to bad medical practice or, in the worst case, dehumanization of the patient. Nevertheless, objectification also plays a major and necessary role in medicine: the patient's body should be viewed as a biological organism in order to find diseases and be able to cure them. Listening to the patient's illness story should not be replaced, but, indeed, developed by the physical examination of his body searching for the causes of his complaints. Whereas phenomenologists have so far mainly been identifying the back sides of objectification in medicine, in this paper the aim is to analyze differences between detrimental objectifications and objectifications that do not deprive the patient of his subjectivity but, rather, at least in some cases, may lead the patient to feel more at home with his body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quantified Sleep: Self-Tracking-Technologien und die Neuordnung der Subjektivität im 21. Jahrhundert«. Taking sleep-tracking as its case study, this article seeks to theorise the understandings of the self that are at stake in the Quantified Self (QS) movement and everyday self-tracking practices by bringing together a cultural theorist's and a philosopher's perspectives. We situate the rise of sleep-tracking practices within the sleep crisis discourse, namely, the sense that in today's society sleep disorders are on the rise and sleep deprivation is rife. Through analyses of self-trackers' blogs about sleep, sleep-tracking technologies' marketing information, and the functionalities of these devices and apps, we argue that the drive to self-improve at the heart of self- and sleep-tracking props up an understanding of the self that is centred around achievement. This understanding ends up devaluing sleep and risks contributing to the sleep crisis. We show how these paradoxes can be further understood from an epistemological perspective. Self- and sleeptracking are arguably practices that seek to obtain knowledge by trading referential expert knowledge for self-referential nonexpert knowledge and that strive for self-optimisation by self-sabotaging achievement subjectivity. We conclude that the use of self-tracking technologies magnifies what is essentially a crisis of subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Schlaf-Experimente. Wissensproduktion im Self-Tracking«. Scientific knowledge is a central point of reference for almost all everyday activities - and at the same time, it is doubted more than ever. People who suffer from sleep problems, for example, thus often lack clear instructions because the scientific findings on the subject are fragile and contradictory. Against this background, we treat the digital self-tracking of expertized laypersons as an experimental practice undertaken to reduce uncertainty. Our online ethnography suggests that self-tracking involves at least three prerequisites to reduce uncertainty in everyday life. First, such self-tracking requires, in its interplay of objectivity and subjectivity, a willingness to engage in tinkering and tuning. Second, corresponding arrangements involve a specific form of temporality, continuously linking the past to an open future. And third, through grafting, a continuous expansion of self-tracking arrangements takes place, ultimately leading to a form of knowledge-in-the-making that relates to science but works in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wearable technologies are increasing both in number and variety enabling new ways for collecting personal data, as well as novel interaction modalities. Even though the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community has widely explored the potential applications of wearables, its theoretical contribution on this research field has been far from impressive. Most scholars and designers seem to rely on a series of dominant assumptions that look at wearables "from the outside" by focusing on their "external properties." When these assumptions are fully embraced at design-time, however, they may cloud opportunities for designing for the "internal aspects" of our everyday experience. In this article, I propose a theory that looks at wearables "from the inside,"giving a theoretical backdrop to all those wearable designs that pay attention to the internal aspects of interaction. By adopting a postphenomenological approach, I conceptualize wearable devices as "extensions" of our intentionality and introduce the "extension relation" to explain how wearables may alter how we relate to the world. In doing so, I propose a series of design considerations that aim to trace future research lines for all those wearables that are currently designed from an "externalistic" perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to better understand the functional significance of pro-eating disorder (pro-ED) online spaces for users, the current study investigates identity performance as it plays out on pro-ED Tumblr and Instagram account bios. We used data scraping methodologies to illuminate key facets of pro-ED social media culture beyond thinspiration, and found that pro-ED Tumblr and Instagram bios commonly utilize self-tracking and self-quantification (e.g., self-tracking data regarding exercise and food intake, lowest weight, current weight) to represent online personas. Drawing from this data, we suggest the importance of understanding pro-ED social media use as a mode of enacting eating disorder practices and articulating eating-disordered identities online. More specifically, we posit that self-quantification and self-tracking on social media can be seen as a way that individuals with eating disorders to extend practices of self-containment and control online in a world that increasingly blends online and offline life. By understanding the multifaceted psychological functions of pro-ED social media use we can build more informed interventions aimed at minimizing individuals' needs to engage in such spaces in the first place, which in turn might have a preventive impact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at how games created with the ChoiceScript authoring tool create a situation in which players construct a sense of self using the developer's assumptions hidden within the code. Some interactive narratives use statistics (also called 'alignment systems') to keep track of player choices, saving them in the form of character descriptions such as 'Good', 'Humanity' or 'Booksmarts'. ChoiceScript is an authoring tool designed to encourage the creation of text-based interactive narratives that heavily revolve around such stats and the prominent display of a 'Show Stats' page. This article explores how many ChoiceScript games use the procedural enthymeme to embed the developer's assumptions into their stats. Many ChoiceScript games also have a structure that is evocative of pop culture personality tests. These two elements – the procedural enthymeme and a pop culture personality test structure – combine to generate an experience of developer-mediated self-curation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on a review of U.S. patents dedicated to sleep monitoring and management. It looks specifically at digital inventions that enable the self-monitoring of sleep time and quality through the use of connected devices (quantified sleep). Our aim is to describe the transformations suggested by these inventions when it comes to the individual and collective management of a real public health issue: sleep deprivation. We pay particular attention to the ways quantified-self technologies redistribute individual and collective responsibilities in terms of well-being and health. Are the recommended solutions part of the general movement of “medicalization of daily life”? In what ways? Do they aim to give greater responsibility to individuals, to empower them in relation to their own health? How do they provide for the consultation or not of third parties (medical expertise)? How do these quantified sleep patents take into consideration the various groups that people belong to (family and business in particular)? All these questions are examined through extensive documentary work on 614 patent applications filed before the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

The evolution of connected objects since the 1990s shows that they are increasingly present in our daily lives. From the development of their technical infrastructures, known as the "Internet of Things", to their increasingly ubiquitous connection, technologies are now converging with artificial intelligence and big data towards an "Internet of Behavior", which is increasingly interfaced with bodies and whose challenge is now behavioral analysis. Particularly in the fields of computer science, medicine and marketing, a prolific scientific literature on the subject and its various sociotechnical issues presents these new digital objects as promises of innovation in a growing number of areas, including health, well-being, transportation, architecture (smart buildings), urbanism (smart cities), energy (smart grids), ecology and sports. However, the use of connected objects remains controversial. Contributions from the humanities and social sciences highlight socio-political and anthropological issues regarding the datafication of the world and the impacts on social relations. Although these new objects are profoundly modifying daily life through continuous immersion based on data and automation, anthropological mutations and legal issues remain largely underestimated and even less evaluated.

This research investigates factors influencing the actual usage of wearable fitness devices. Based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology, the authors propose that privacy concerns, social influence, data accuracy, device engagement, and user efficacy impact the actual usage of wearable fitness devices via performance and effort expectancy. Based on 124 responses using the structural equation approach, most hypotheses were supported. The social influence had the strongest indirect effect through performance expectancy, while user efficacy had the strongest indirect effect through effort expectancy. Data accuracy and device engagement had a positive influence on actual usage and privacy concerns negatively affected the device's use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: RealWorld4Clinic is a European consortium that is currently developing an implantable monitoring device for acute heart failure prevention. Objective: This study aimed to identify the main issues and information needs related to this new cardiac implant from the patients' perspective. Methods: A total of 3 patient collaborators were recruited to help us design the study. During 4 remotely held meetings (each lasting for 2 hours), we defined the main questions and hypotheses together. Next, 26 additional interviews were conducted remotely to test these hypotheses. During both phases, we used affect stories, which are life narratives focusing on affect and the relationship between patients and the care ecosystem, to highlight the main social issues that should be addressed by the research according to the patients. Results: Context of diagnosis, age, and severity of illness strongly influence patient experience. However, these variables do not seem to influence the choice regarding being implanted, which relies mostly on the individual patient's trust in their physicians. It seems that the major cause of anxiety for the patient is not the implant but the disease itself, although some people may initially be concerned over the idea of becoming a cyborg. Remote monitoring of cardiac implants should draw on existing remote disease management programs focusing on a long-term relationship between the patient and their medical team. Conclusions: Co-design with affect stories is a useful method for quickly identifying the main social issues related to information about a new health technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]