In this study, the authors examine patient use of and feelings about wearable technologies for health attainment and management. Based on an online survey of 81 patients using wearable technologies... Show More

In this study, the authors examine patient use of and feelings about wearable technologies for health attainment and management. Based on an online survey of 81 patients using wearable technologies to track and manage health, as well as interviews with three patients utilizing wearables for health management, the authors examine how wearable technologies are being used by patients to attain health, manage health, and/or prevent health issues, and what value users find in these wearable technologies. The authors also examine how such use is impacting communication between medical professionals and patients. Specifically, the authors explore how the inclusion of wearable technologies has changed the “rhetorical relationship” between patients and medical professionals. The study concludes with a discussion of the future of wearable devices in patient-medical practitioner relationships and clinical settings.

Wearable technologies' popularity in sporting practices continues to grow. Runners use GPS watches and activity trackers to track steps, log miles, map courses, and monitor heart rates. Likewise... Show More

Wearable technologies' popularity in sporting practices continues to grow. Runners use GPS watches and activity trackers to track steps, log miles, map courses, and monitor heart rates. Likewise, wearables are integrated into long distance running events, with race officials relying on technologies to effectively execute events. However, technologies can also enable and monitor cheating. Many studies focusing on the individual explore why cheaters make unethical decisions. Actor-Network Theory shifts cheating's focus from the individual and moral failings to an assemblage that includes not only the runner, but nonhumans, such as technology, as well. A 2015 Canadian Ironman cheating incident case study illuminates intricate relationships and networks between humans and nonhumans. By examining the intersections of cheating and technology in running sports, the authors see where and how technology works as intended or is repurposed. Whereas a human-centered approach to sport and cheating dismisses wearables' agency, Actor-Network Theory reveals their underexamined, sociotechnical complexities.

Wearables produce a body of data controlled by the user of the wearable, and the institution creating the device or collecting the device information, and community members engaging with the... Show More

Wearables produce a body of data controlled by the user of the wearable, and the institution creating the device or collecting the device information, and community members engaging with the devices. This article examines the privacy policies of the top five wearable vendors of 2016 to analyze how corporations describe the bodies of digital data they amass through surveillant assemblage. Results indicate four points of agency which surround bodies of digital information: data as alter ego, data under personal control, institutional power, and community. Although scholarship often emphasizes that entities of power control information, and wearable companies emphasize the user's ability to control their information, there are multiple ways the authors can think about the data, and not addressing the complexity of data can lead to limited ideas about agency, identity, surveillance, and visibility.

This article examines how some of the social and political implications to immersive wearables, particularly in their capacity as surveillance technology, threaten to transform if not undermine the... Show More

This article examines how some of the social and political implications to immersive wearables, particularly in their capacity as surveillance technology, threaten to transform if not undermine the fundamental values behind the western liberal democracy. Precisely because immersive wearables will, in many cases, prove invaluable easy will it probably be for their associated social and political risks to be lost among the excitement, at least early on. Before, that is, such risks become hard realities and woven into the fabric of civilization. For this reason, this article looks to serve as a modest premortem on the social and political implications to immersive wearables, whereby encouraging the practice of anticipating and proactively interrogating what it means to essentially transform the bodily act of apprehending both the physical world and the digital one––heretofore mostly disjointed experiences, united only by the faculties used––into one primarily mediated by networked computer interfaces based on immersion.