Digital technologies and the biomedicalisation of everyday activities: The case of walking and cycling

Walking and cycling have been transformed by digital technologies, which range from mapping apps for way-finding, through ‘wearables’ which monitor activity, to social media apps for comparing activity within social groups. Some technologies are explicitly orientated to health projects, others are not, yet all have potentially profound effects on bodies, health-orientated identities and understandings of health. This paper uses the concept of biomedicalisation to explore emerging literature on the intersection of digital technologies with everyday mobility, focusing on walking and cycling. Beyond simply ‘medicalising’ mobility (by bringing it into the realm of public health), digital technologies contribute to various transformations of health: encouraging some health practices, inhibiting others; creating or excluding individual and collective health-related identities; and reconfiguring health and wellbeing. There is research evidence on the contingent and multiple relationships between digital technologies and social practices, with specific themes including: quantification; the role of apps in framing walking as extraordinary, cycling as competitive; enabling users to perform as healthy, neoliberal citizens; and digital careers. There has been less attention on how social divisions are reproduced or disrupted by the mediation of mobility through digital technologies. Further research should consider the impact of digital technologies on political economies of health.

[1]  Thomas Zimmermann,et al.  Persuasive technology in the real world: a study of long-term use of activity sensing devices for fitness , 2014, CHI.

[2]  BA LisaBostock.  Pathways of disadvantage? Walking as a mode of transport among low-income mothers , 2008 .

[3]  K. O’Riordan,et al.  Training to self-care: fitness tracking, biopedagogy and the healthy consumer , 2017 .

[4]  C. Tudor-Locke,et al.  How Many Steps/Day Are Enough? , 2004, Sports medicine.

[5]  Mike Michael,et al.  These Boots Are Made for Walking...: Mundane Technology, the Body and Human-Environment Relations , 2000 .

[6]  Ulf Ekelund,et al.  Is wearing a pedometer associated with higher physical activity among adolescents? , 2013, Preventive medicine.

[7]  R. Furberg,et al.  Systematic review of the validity and reliability of consumer-wearable activity trackers , 2015, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

[8]  R. Rettie,et al.  Effectiveness of a smartphone app in increasing physical activity amongst male adults: a randomised controlled trial , 2016, BMC Public Health.

[9]  P. Kiernan.  Language, Identity and Cycling in the New Media Age: Exploring Interpersonal Semiotics in Multimodal Media and Online Texts , 2017 .

[10]  Jordan Frith,et al.  Wearing the City: Memory P(a)laces, Smartphones, and the Rhetorical Invention of Embodied Space , 2016 .

[11]  Natasha D. Schüll,et al.  The Datafication of Health , 2017 .

[12]  Aydogan Ozcan,et al.  Mobile health: the power of wearables, sensors, and apps to transform clinical trials , 2016, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

[13]  Deborah Lupton,et al.  Critical perspectives on digital health technologies , 2014 .

[14]  B. Latour.  We Have Never Been Modern , 1991 .

[15]  Luc Int Panis,et al.  Improving health through policies that promote active travel: a review of evidence to support integrated health impact assessment. , 2011, Environment international.

[16]  Trevor van Mierlo.  Wearables, Gamified Group Challenges and Behavioral Incentives: A Preliminary Study of an Engagement Program to Increase Physical Activity , 2015 .

[17]  Liam Richard West.  Strava: challenge yourself to greater heights in physical activity/cycling and running , 2015, British Journal of Sports Medicine.

[18]  Sean P Mullen,et al.  Increasing Physical Activity With Mobile Devices: A Meta-Analysis , 2012, Journal of medical Internet research.

[19]  B. Ainsworth,et al.  Descriptive epidemiology of pedometer-determined physical activity. , 2004, Medicine and science in sports and exercise.

[20]  Evangelos Karapanos,et al.  How do we engage with activity trackers?: a longitudinal study of Habito , 2015, UbiComp.

[21]  Nicholas D. Gilson,et al.  Measuring and Influencing Physical Activity with Smartphone Technology: A Systematic Review , 2014, Sports Medicine.

[22]  Pernille Bjørn,et al.  Unforeseen Challenges - Adopting Wearable Health Data Tracking Devices to Reduce Health Insurance Costs in Organizations , 2015, HCI.

[23]  R. Silverstone,et al.  Consuming technologies : media and information in domestic spaces , 1993 .

[24]  A. Bauman,et al.  Health benefits of cycling: a systematic review , 2011, Scandinavian journal of medicine & science in sports.

[25]  Jonas Larsen,et al.  The making of a pro-cycling city: Social practices and bicycle mobilities , 2017 .

[26]  Catrine Tudor-Locke,et al.  Health benefits of a pedometer-based physical activity intervention in sedentary workers. , 2004, Preventive medicine.

[27]  L. Bostock,et al.  Pathways of disadvantage? Walking as a mode of transport among low-income mothers. , 2001, Health & social care in the community.

[28]  Stine Lomborg,et al.  Self-tracking as communication , 2016 .

[29]  Irina Shklovski,et al.  Steps, Choices and Moral Accounting: Observations from a Step-Counting Campaign in the Workplace , 2016, CSCW.

[30]  M. Guha.  The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior and Society , 2014 .

[31]  R. Silverstone,et al.  Information and communication technologies and the moral economy of the household , 2003 .

[32]  D. Lupton.  M-health and health promotion: The digital cyborg and surveillance society , 2012, Social Theory & Health.

[33]  L. Cadmus-Bertram,et al.  Randomized Trial of a Fitbit-Based Physical Activity Intervention for Women. , 2015, American journal of preventive medicine.

[34]  G. Kendall.  Bruno Latour: Hybrid Thoughts in a Hybrid World , 2013 .

[35]  S. Groth.  QUANTIFIED CYCLISTS AND STRATIFIED MOTIVES Explorations into Age-Group Road Cycling as Cultural Performance , 2022 .

[36]  A. Clarke,et al.  Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine , 2003, American Sociological Review.

[37]  D. Conroy,et al.  Behavior change techniques in top-ranked mobile apps for physical activity. , 2014, American journal of preventive medicine.

[38]  Tim Schwanen,et al.  Beyond instrument: smartphone app and sustainable mobility , 2015 .

[39]  Wiebe E. Bijker,et al.  Of Bicycles, Bakelites, and Bulbs: Toward a Theory of Sociotechnical Change , 1995 .

[40]  A. Meershoek,et al.  Creating a market in workplace health promotion: the performative role of public health sciences and technologies , 2016 .

[41]  C. Till.  Commercialising Bodies: Action, Subjectivity and the New Corporate Health Ethic , 2018 .

[42]  J. Green.  ‘Walk this way’: Public health and the social organization of walking , 2009 .

[43]  Elizabeth J. Lyons,et al.  Using an electronic activity monitor system as an intervention modality: A systematic review , 2015, BMC Public Health.

[44]  Barry A. T. Brown,et al.  Mediated Pedestrian Mobility: Walking and the Map App , 2016 .

[45]  Steve Mann,et al.  New Media and the power politics of sousveillance in a surveillance-dominated world. , 2013 .

[46]  C. Till.  Exercise as Labour: Quantified Self and the Transformation of Exercise into Labour , 2014 .

[47]  N. Thorogood,et al.  The domestication of an everyday health technology: A case study of electric toothbrushes , 2013, Social theory & health : STH.

[48]  Catrine Tudor-Locke,et al.  Why Do Pedometers Work? , 2009, Sports medicine.

[49]  Parisa Eslambolchilar,et al.  Walking in the Wild - Using an Always-On Smartphone Application to Increase Physical Activity , 2013, INTERACT.

[50]  Peter E. S. Freund,et al.  Hyperautomobility, the Social Organization of Space, and Health , 2007 .

[51]  Jonas Larsen,et al.  The Unstable Lives of Bicycles: The ‘Unbecoming’ of Design Objects , 2015 .

[52]  D. Lupton.  Quantifying the body: monitoring and measuring health in the age of mHealth technologies , 2013 .

[53]  S. Houghton,et al.  Virtually impossible: limiting Australian children and adolescents daily screen based media use , 2015, BMC Public Health.

[54]  Bjorn Nansen,et al.  Step-counting: The anatomo- and chrono-politics of pedometrics , 2008 .

[55]  P. Barratt.  Healthy competition: A qualitative study investigating persuasive technologies and the gamification of cycling , 2017, Health & place.

[56]  J. P. Higgins,et al.  Smartphone Applications for Patients' Health and Fitness. , 2016, The American journal of medicine.

[57]  Denise A. Copelton.  Output that counts: pedometers, sociability and the contested terrain of older adult fitness walking. , 2010, Sociology of health & illness.

[58]  J. Brug,et al.  Apps to promote physical activity among adults: a review and content analysis , 2014, International Journal of Behavioral Nutrition and Physical Activity.

[59]  R. Rettie,et al.  Walking as a social practice: dispersed walking and the organisation of everyday practices. , 2016, Sociology of health & illness.

[60]  W. R. Smith,et al.  Striving to Be King of Mobile Mountains: Communication and Organizing Through Digital Fitness Technology , 2017 .

[61]  Dick Ettema,et al.  Big Data and Cycling , 2016 .

[62]  Robert C. Nickerson,et al.  Mobile Technology and Smartphone Apps: A Diffusion of Innovations Analysis , 2014, AMCIS.

[63]  M. Petticrew,et al.  What Are the Health Benefits of Active Travel? A Systematic Review of Trials and Cohort Studies , 2013, PloS one.

[64]  Rebecca Steinbach,et al.  Cycling and the city: a case study of how gendered, ethnic and class identities can shape healthy transport choices. , 2011, Social science & medicine.

[65]  M. Hassenzahl,et al.  Wellbeing in the Making: Peoples’ Experiences with Wearable Activity Trackers , 2016, Psychology of well-being.