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

This article describes and analyzes how members of QS communities conceptualize and in-terpret 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 self-measurement 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.