Your health in numbers. A sociological analysis of two Quantified-self Communities

This article describes and analyzes how members of QS communities conceptualize and interpret 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 selfmeasurement 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.