Lynch R., Farrington C. (eds.) Quantified Lives and Vital Data: Exploring Health and Technology through Personal Medical Devices

London: Palgrave Macmillan UK, 2018. — 310 p.This book raises questions about the changing relationships between technology, people and health. It examines the accelerating pace of technological development and a general shift to personalized, patient-led medicine. Such relationships are increasingly mediated through particular medical technologies, drawn together by the authors as ‘personal medical devices’ (PMDs) – devices that are attached to, worn by, interacted with, or carried by individuals for the purposes of generating biomedical data and carrying out medical interventions on the person concerned. The burgeoning PMD field is advancing rapidly across multiple domains and disciplines – so rapidly that conceptual and empirical research and thinking around PMDs, and their clinical, social and philosophical implications, often lag behind new technical developments and medical interventions. This timely and original volume explores the significant and under-researched impact of personal medical devices on contemporary understandings of health and illness. It will be a valuable read for scholars and practitioners of medicine, health, science and technology and social science.Personal Medical Devices: People and Technology in the Context of Health
Theorising Personal Medical DevicesBiosensing Networks: Sense-Making in Consumer Genomics and Ovulation Tracking
In/Visible Personal Medical Devices: The Insulin Pump as a Visual and Material Mediator Between Selves and Others
Redrawing Boundaries Around the Self: The Case of Self-Quantifying TechnologiesData as Transformational: Constrained and Liberated Bodies in an ‘Artificial Pancreas’ Study
PMDs and the Moral Specialness of Medicine: An Analysis of the ‘Keepsake Ultrasound’
Slippery Slopes and Trojan Horses: The Construction of E-Cigarettes as Risky Objects in Public Health DebateBlood Informatics: Negotiating the Regulation and Usership of Personal Devices for Medical Care and Recreational Self-monitoring
Commercialising Bodies: Action, Subjectivity and the New Corporate Health Ethic
Co-Designing for Care: Craft and Wearable WellbeingQuantified Lives and Vital Data: Some Concluding Remarks