Slides from a presentation on the use of mobile digital devices for health promotion. Sociological critique of how these devices may make people think of their bodies and health in different ways. Presented at the 'Surveillence In/And Everyday Life' conference, University of Sydney, 21 February 2012.

1. M-HEALTH TECHNOLOGIES: CONFIGURING BODIES AND HEALTH
IN SURVEILLANCE SOCIETY
Deborah Lupton, Department of Sociology and Social Policy,
University of Sydney

2. What is m-health?
• Using Web 2.0 platforms incorporating:
• social media such as Facebook, YouTube,
Twitter, blogs and wikis
• mobile wireless computer technologies such
as smartphones and tablet computers
• to measure health indices, provide treatment
regimens and promote health.

3. Medical biometric devices
• Smart pill boxes
• Blood glucose
• Blood chemistry readings
• Blood pressure, heart rate and cardiac output
readings
• Movement sensors

4. Commercial health apps
• Exercise programs
• Digitalised scales and blood pressure devices
• Menstrual cycles and ovulation patterns
• Sleep patterns
• Hearing tests
• Pregnancy and labour logs
• Fat and lean body mass using a caliper
• Alcohol intake

10. Theorising the body/machine interface
• The cyborg body
• The post-human body
• The surveillant medical gaze
• Surveillant assemblages
• Data-doubles
• Participatory surveillance

11. Some new approaches …
• The spectacular body
• Prosthetic culture
• Technology use as performance
• Domesticating technologies – the social life of
things

12. Exhibit from Body Worlds

14. Example of medical app

15. Stelarc – Third Hand

16. Stelarc – Third Ear

17. Theorising Stelarc’s work
Electronic sensory becomes our new sensory
skin
The body performing beyond the boundaries of
its skin
The body as a nexus or node of collaborating
agents
‘We are all Stelarcs now’

18. Future research questions
• What are the implications for subjectivities
and embodiment in the world of m-health?

19. • How are the assemblages of m-health
technologies/practices/flesh enacted and
lived?
• What are the political dimensions and power
relations inherent in the use of these
technologies?

20. • How will privacy (or loss of privacy) be defined
and experienced in the context of these
media?
• What are the implications for how people
conduct their everyday lives and intimate
relationships?

21. More specifically …
• Will the ‘nagging voices’ of the health
promoting messages automatically issuing
forth from a person’s mobile device be
eventually ignored by its user?

22. • Will m-health technologies produce a cyborg,
post-human self in which the routine
collection of data about bodily actions and
functions is simply incorporated
unproblematically into the user’s sense of
selfhood and embodiment?

23. • How will concepts of ‘health’ itself be shaped
and understood in a context in which one’s
biometric indicators may be constantly
measured, analysed and displayed publicly?

24. • Will the ‘objective’ measurements offered by
mobile devices take precedence over the
‘subjective’ assessments offered by the senses
of the fleshly body?