Living Data: Making Sense of Health Bio-Sensing
Maggie Mort, Celia Roberts, and Adrian Mackenzie
Abstract
Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical knowledges and online platforms meet around bodies. This book contrasts forms of health biosensing in significant life events ranging from conception to ageing. It explores practicalities, histories and promises of fertility and hormonal biosensing, stress biosensing, DNA genotyping platforms, and old-age biosensing. While the biosensing industries promote promise-horizons of the ‘soon’, ethnographic storie ... More
Biosensors and biosensing practices collect and share living data, data concerning changes in body states. Health biosensing emerges where devices, health experience, scientific and medical knowledges and online platforms meet around bodies. This book contrasts forms of health biosensing in significant life events ranging from conception to ageing. It explores practicalities, histories and promises of fertility and hormonal biosensing, stress biosensing, DNA genotyping platforms, and old-age biosensing. While the biosensing industries promote promise-horizons of the ‘soon’, ethnographic stories of failure and disappointment abound. ‘Living data’ may be about health for many people, but still happens mostly outside biomedicine or clinical practice. Yet biosensing has the potential to change human bodies and lives in barely imagined ways. This book argues for thinking about biosensing platforms and bodies together to understand that potential and to recognise harms and limitations.
Keywords:
Health biosensing,
biosensors,
bodies,
platforms,
self-monitoring,
self-tracking,
data,
sociology,
ethnography,
science and technology studies
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2019 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781447348665 |
| Published to Policy Press Scholarship Online: January 2020 |
DOI:10.1332/policypress/9781447348665.001.0001 |
Authors
Affiliations are at time of print publication.
Maggie Mort, author
Lancaster University
Celia Roberts, author
Lancaster University
Adrian Mackenzie, author
Lancaster University
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