6–10 Jun 2022
Tübingen
Europe/Berlin timezone

Aging bodies, young technology: Discourses of self-tracking, physical activity and health

8 Jun 2022, 16:30
20m

Speaker

Marte Knutsson

Description

This paper presents analyses from an ongoing project that asks the following research questions: “what discourses are informing aging adults who engage in self-monitoring practices, and how do they navigate the discourses of the body, aging, technology, physical activity and health?”

As Western countries experience a “greying of the population”, tele-health is widely promoted as a means of reducing the pressure on public health services by offering aging groups medical care through digital solutions (Kruse et al., 2017; Robbins et al., 2018). Smart watches for monitoring physical activity have become extremely popular in this respect. However, scant attention has been paid to how the elderly interact with commercial devices for health monitoring (Urban, 2017). Consequently, one central aim of this project is to explore whether, and how, such practices contribute in shaping the identities of aging subjects.

The data have been generated by in-depth interviews (Kvale & Brinkmann, 2009) with a sample of female and male Norwegians over the age of 60. The textual material has been interpreted through the lens of discourse analysis (Foucault, 2010 [1972]; Markula & Pringle, 2006), drawing upon theoretical frameworks such as new materialism and sociological perspectives on aging and health (Gilleard & Higgs, 2014; Lupton, 2020). Preliminary findings suggest there are multiple ways of interpreting and relating to the data accumulated by wearable devices. Emerging themes are the entanglements of fleshy bodies and data flows, management of the risks that aging bodies are exposed to, and the negotiations between humans and their data.

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