Paper given at the Reproductive Biopolitics workshop, University of Sydney, 3 October 2014

1. Digitising pregnancy: new ways of
monitoring, measuring and visualising
unborn and pregnant bodies
Deborah Lupton, News & Media
Research Centre, University of
Canberra
@DALupton

2. Intersections of research interests
pregnancy +
motherhood
digital
health
big data
digitised
children
digital
sociology

5. Apps as sociocultural artefacts
apps
human
decision-making
tech
affordances
tacit
assumptions
digital
knowledge
economy

6. Apps as knowledge objects
• they present knowledges
• they reproduce knowledges
• they create knowledges

7. Health apps as domestic medical devices
• They monitor bodies’ functions and activities
• They convey health and medical information
• They diagnose
• They can link to healthcare providers or health
insurers

8. Types of pregnancy apps 1
preconception care
fertility trackers
pregnancy information
pregnancy monitoring
baby names
labour/birth information
labour/birth monitoring

9. Types of pregnancy apps 2
information for fathers
pregnancy-related games
meditation/affirmation/relaxation in pregnancy/birth
baby products guides
pregnancy journals/scrapbooks
pregnant belly time lapse tool

10. BabyBump Pregnancy Free

11. BabyBump Pregnancy Free

12. Happy Pregnancy Ticker

13. Bellabeat

14. Glow + Glow Nurture

15. Glow Nurture

16. Glow Nurture

17. Glow Nurture

18. Glow Nurture

19. How popular are they?
• I’m Expecting – Pregnancy App (over 40,000 ratings,
1-5 million downloads on Google Play)
• BabyBump Pregnancy Free (over 30,000 ratings, 1-5
million downloads on Google Play)

20. Implications 1
• reproducing and creating norms of pregnancy
• disciplining and responsibilising the pregnant
body
• separation of unborn body from pregnant
body
• privileging of unborn needs/rights over
woman’s

21. Implications 2
• pregnant woman as valuable
commodity/target for marketing
• pregnant woman as data-emitting body
• personal data used for monitoring by health
insurance companies (US)
• joining up of different datasets/data doubles
• circulations/repurposing of data
• cybernetic nature of data

22. lively
data
aesthetics
emotion
lively capital
data
subjects/doubles
flow & circulation
multiple
uses/repurposing