Quantified

Biosensing Technologies in Everyday Life

Dawn Nafus

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Computer Science
• eBook ISBN:
  9780262334556
• Subtopic: Human-Computer Interaction
• Index: Computer Science

Today anyone can purchase technology that can track, quantify, and measure the body and its environment. Wearable or portable sensors detect heart rates, glucose levels, steps taken, water quality, genomes, and microbiomes, and turn them into electronic data. Is this phenomenon empowering, or a new form of social control? Who volunteers to enumerate bodily experiences, and who is forced to do so? Who interprets the resulting data? How does all this affect the relationship between medical practice and self care, between scientific and lay knowledge? Quantified examines these and other issues that arise when biosensing technologies become part of everyday life.

The book offers a range of perspectives, with views from the social sciences, cultural studies, journalism, industry, and the nonprofit world. The contributors consider data, personhood, and the urge to self-quantify; legal, commercial, and medical issues, including privacy, the outsourcing of medical advice, and self-tracking as a "paraclinical" practice; and technical concerns, including interoperability, sociotechnical calibration, alternative views of data, and new space for design.

Contributors
Marc Böhlen, Geoffrey C. Bowker, Sophie Day, Anna de Paula Hanika, Deborah Estrin, Brittany Fiore-Gartland, Dana Greenfield, Judith Gregory, Mette Kragh-Furbo, Celia Lury, Adrian Mackenzie, Rajiv Mehta, Maggie Mort, Dawn Nafus, Gina Neff, Helen Nissenbaum, Heather Patterson, Celia Roberts, Jamie Sherman, Alex Taylor, Gary Wolf

Table of contents

• Half Title
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• I Biosensing and Representation
• 1 Do Biosensors Biomedicalize? Sites of Negotiation in DNA-Based Biosensing Data Practices
• 2 Data in the Age of Digital Reproduction: Reading the Quantified Self through Walter Benjamin
• 3 Biosensing: Tracking Persons
• 4 The Quantified Self: Reverse Engineering
• II Institutional Arrangements
• 5 Biosensing in Context: Health Privacy in a Connected World
• 6 Disruption and the Political Economy of Biosensor Data
• 7 Deep Data: Notes of the n of 1
• 8 Consumer Health Innovation Opportunities and Privacy Challenges: A View from the Trenches
• III Seeing Like a Builder
• 9 Open mHealth and the Problem of Data Interoperability
• 10 Field Notes in Contamination Studies
• 11 Data, (Bio)Sensing, and (Other-)Worldly Stories from the Cycle Routes of London
• 12 The Data Citizen, the Quantified Self, and Personal Genomics
• Epilogue
• Biographical Sketches
• Index