At the 2017 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, electronics giant Samsung surprised business watchers with a major shift in market development plans. Expected to focus on robots, Samsung instead announced that it saw more potential in the wearable health sector, believing that ‘an ageing society will help this market segment grow more quickly’ (Maslakovic, 2017). While wearable devices include a range of technologies, wearable digital fitness trackers are the heart of this large and growing market (Lamkin, 2016).

In this chapter, I consider the ways that embodied ageing may be shaped by these devices and their consequences in the everyday lives of older adults. As these devices translate bodily movement into quantifiable outputs, they produce data that can then be used, shared and/or displayed in different ways, and are bound up with discourses of risk management. While research in the biomedical and exercise sciences focuses on how self-tracking devices can enhance interventions aimed at behavior modification with older adults, I argue that we need to attend more carefully to how practices of self-tracking and the data they produce circulate through networks of technologies, relationships and regimes of expertise, and the ways in which quantification is embedded in everyday social worlds.

Self-tracking and the production of healthy ageing ‘lifestyles’

Industry observers seem surprised that manufacturers have been so slow to recognise the potential in the ‘grey’ market. After all, self-monitoring for health is hardly a new activity, especially for older people, who have long been expected to ‘live by numbers’ (Oxlund, 2012) by measuring and monitoring such things as weight, blood pressure and cholesterol levels (see also Pickard and Rogers, 2012; Crawford et al, 2015). One senior industry analyst, for example, suggests that: