Main description:

The use of digital tracking technologies is a widespread phenomenon. Millions of people around the world now track, document, and analyse their physical activities, vital functions, and daily habits through wearable devices, apps, and platforms. The aim is to assess and improve health, productivity, and wellbeing. The current Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the uptake of tracking technologies.

At the heart of this trend lies the quantification of the body, deemed as a key element in medical practice and personal self-care. While often couched in positive promotional terms that highlight its value to users' mental, emotional, and physical health, it is also raising a host of issues and concerns that are at once ontological, ethical, political, social, legal, economic, and aesthetic.

The Quantification of Bodies in Health aims to deepen understanding of this growing phenomenon and of the role of self-tracking practices in everyday life. It brings together established and emerging authors working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and digital culture, while bridging between philosophical and empirical approaches.

A timely topic of extreme relevance and significance, The Quantification of Bodies in Health constitutes a useful and unique companion for anyone interested in the study of body quantification and self-tracking practices.

Contents:

INTRODUCTION; Btihaj Ajana, Joaquim Braga, and Simone Guidi

PART I: Body Quantification and Subjectivity: Philosophical Perspectives

Chapter 1. Body, Media and Quantification; Joaquim Braga

Chapter 2. I Quantify, Therefore I Am: Quantified Self Between Hermeneutics of Self and Transparency; Lorenzo De Stefano

Chapter 3. Quantified Care: Self-Tracking as a Technology of the Subject; Alessandro De Cesaris

PART II: Body Quantification: Historical and Empirical Perspectives

Chapter 4. Historical Context of Tracking Public Health and Quantifying Bodies: From the UK Welfare State to Digital Self-Care; Rachael Kent

Chapter 5. Metrics of the Self: A Users' Perspective; Btihaj Ajana

Chapter 6. Whose Bodies? Approaching the Quantified Menstruating Body Through a Feminist Ethnography; Amanda Karlsson

PART III: Body Quantification and Mental Health

Chapter 7. #Wellness or #Hellness: The Politics of Anxiety and the Riddle of Affect in Contemporary Psy-care; Ana Carolina Minozzo

Chapter 8. Me Apps: Mental Health and the Smartphone; Zeena Feldman

PART IV: Body Quantification and Smart Machines

Chapter 9. The 'Smart' AI Trainer & her Quantified Body at Work; Phoebe V. Moore

Chapter 10. Towards a Quanto-Qualitative Biological Engineering: The Case of the Neuroprosthetic Hand; Laura Corti