Virtually Extending the Bodies with (Health) Technologies

Self-perception of the body will increasingly change in the future because of new web technologies. The building of big databases concerning bodily features together with the creation of portals dedicated to the management of such data by individual users and by institutions or companies in charge of specific functions, such as electronic health record (EHR), or electronic medical record (EMR), will bring a new conception of the self as a body, and therefore as a cognitive embodied agent. I suggest a conceptual framework of the extended mind thesis is useful to analyze and understand the coming developments of such a trend. I deal with the extended mind thesis and build an analogy between the extended mind thesis and a sort of extended body thesis. Then, I speak about social and second bodies and changes in body schema and image, by supporting this study’s claim with examples from health care technologies and introducing the virtual cyborg perspective to outline some potential further developments related to virtually extended bodies.