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By utilizing technology to collect and analyze data, we can gain valuable insights into our well-being.

One of the common goals of the #quantifiedself movement is the use of health technology is to optimize our lives - push our physical limits, enhance productivity, and achieve peak performance. There are hundreds of apps to help you to maximize your potential using various data - nutrition, exercise, heart rate, breathing, habit tracking, screentime, steps walked, the list goes on...

Have you noticed the oversimplified narratives provided by health apps, viewing the body as separate parts rather than a connected whole? Eg when one app tells you you slept well and will have lots of energy and another app says your period is starting and to take things slow. It's hard to know what to believe

How can we acknowledge the complexities and interdependencies within our bodies, explore the intricacies of living, breathing beings, rather than dissecting them into isolated components?

Health tech enables us to track previously imperceptible metrics, like our heart rate or sleep patterns. The availability of detailed metrics, can even foster a compulsion to continually seek complete data, a seemingly holistic image of health.

This insatiable thirst for #healthdata can cause overreliance on the health tech, and affect our ability to maintain a balanced and genuine approach to #selfcare, beyond the numbers and graphs.

An alarming consequence of relying heavily on health data is the erosion of trust in our own experiences and intuition. Sometimes app data contradicts our own bodily sensations and subjective assessments.

For example, you wake up in the morning and think <oh wow, I'm so rested, what a great nights sleep>. But then you open your phone to a notification that says you slept poorly, so take care because you're going to be tired today.

How is that going to make you feel?

We often believe that this thing is telling the truth. It has more data than we do. It's objective. It's research-based. But self-reported feelings of rest are often more accurate than conclusions from data.

Placing excessive faith in technology's objectivity can lead to a disconnection from our own bodies and a loss of self-trust.

Finding a balance between utilizing technology and trusting our own instincts is critical to maintaining a healthy relationship with self-tracking tools.

Of course this thread is a relatively cynical read of the #quantifiedself, but for me it contained some really interesting learnings.

The workshop went on to discuss a "queering" of this data - for example, by handing control of the data and the analysis to the user, to give them the tools to ask and answer questions about their own bodies.

Common goals used in data tracking health apps are not universal - eg self-optimisation, improved productivity, weight-loss/thinness, fertility/pregnancy.

Maybe there is potential for this industry to be subverted, or "queered", somehow. To become investigators of topics that are important to our own diverse and individual life experiences.

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Huge props to RadicalData for raising these topics and giving me so much food for thought. Read more about the project here https://radicaldata.org/projects/queering-the-quantified-self/

One interesting question this raises for me is - have we gone about this quantified self movement the wrong way?

Maybe it's just my personal interest in medical tech, but instead of releasing these as consumer products, couldn't we have used this data for research - doing long term clinical studies of people eg with a specific heart condition and a control group and learned what the warning signs for these conditions are - and support early diagnosis?