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Morsello, Barbara | Moretti, Veronica

Your health in numbers : a sociological analysis of two Quantified-self Communities

2017 - Franco Angeli

214-227 p.

  • This article describes and analyzes how members of QS communities conceptualize and in-terpret data about themselves, and in particular, about their health. Our methodology is based on twenty semi-structured interviews with members of Quantified-self communities based in Turin, Italy and Cambridge, U.K. The results of these interviews show how self-measurement practices help to facilitate better management of one's health, especially when health-management is considered in a broader framework of general self-improvement. Furthermore, although self-tracking heightens users' health-related competence - and in turn, seems to reduce the traditional jurisdiction of doctors - an overarching frame of medicalization remains intact; indeed, the alleged "scientificness" of the self-quantification involved in self-tracking itself exemplifies the medicalization of daily life. [Publishers' text].

Is part of

Salute e società : XVI, supplemento 3, 2017