The wide adoption of self-tracking technologies by users to manage health, as well as the increasing efficacy of digital and surveillance capitalism to mine, monetise, make inferences and repurpose personal data for health profiling and targeted advertising, has led to an everyday ‘datafication of health’ (Ruckenstein and Schüll, 2017): the collective tools, technologies and processes used to turn many aspects of our lifestyle and health into data and new forms of value exchange. This chapter examines these conceptual and practical shifts towards the datafication of health that self-tracking technologies and social media have brought about through a theoretical and empirical analytical approach, drawing on data from interviews, reflexive diaries and online content. Through different technological, practical and economic shifts, from the self-quantification movement to consumer self-tracking to the increasing everyday datafication of health and digital phenotyping, this chapter traces how data collection, mining and sharing have become an integral part of health management and self-care for users, citizens and patients under digital capitalism. Through behavioural economic theories of choice architecture and nudge theory (Thaler and Sunstein, 2009) the chapter argues for the need to pay ethical attention to the persuasive and coercive design within self-tracking and digital health technologies. It analyses the impact of health gamification (Whitson, 2015) and what it means when we understand our health, body, and identity through data, current debates in new materialism (Barad, 2007, 2014; Braidotti, 2018; Lupton, 2019) and the political economy of the datafication of health (Moore, 2018). The chapter concludes by considering the ongoing and long-term assemblage of humans with the reductive patterns of datafication and how these processes can promote the regulation and agential (re)organisation of bodily experience of the digital health self through everyday reductive processes of datafication.

From self-quantification to self-tracking

To understand the practices and implications of datafication upon health management, I must start by analysing its relationship to self-quantification. Self-quantification is the reliance upon science and the technological extensions and affordances of scientific sensors in the monitoring of the self and individual health (Wolf, 2010).