Fitness Trackers in Everyday Life - Are Wearables Making us Healthier?

Essay from the year 2017 in the subject Communications - Multimedia, Internet, New Technologies, grade: 1,0, University of Augsburg, language: English, abstract: This essay analyzes the impact of fitness trackers in everdyday life. The most important question is: Are wearables making us healthier? In order to answer this quite profound question, I will try to examine the term 'health'. Then, the concept of social practices will assist me with discussing how health can be achieved throughout everyday life. A critical analysis of how wearables can change people's routines into healthier one's will follow. Yet, this essay aims to go further than a mere replication of studies on the effects of wearables and rather address different perspectives in the field. Therefore, I will also include different perspectives on self-tracking and touch upon the pressure that can arise from self-tracking, not just individually but in society. In the recent years, fitness wearables and mobile applications have made monitoring the body and tracking healthy routines more popular than ever. People are now counting their daily steps, monitoring sleep-patterns or tracking their calorie intake. Self-tracking, however, is by no means a new phenomenon, as weight-scales or diaries have been around for many decades. Keeping track of body weight, for example, has been done privately and was separated from other actions of daily life. Given the technological possibilities of wearables, they shift self-tracking into all areas of everyday and social life.