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Conference Paper/Proceeding/Abstract 243 views

The Subjectivities of Wearable Sleep-Trackers - A Discourse Analysis

Anna Nolda Nagele, Julian Hough, Zara Dinnen

CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts

Swansea University Author: Julian Hough

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DOI (Published version): 10.1145/3491101.3519677

Abstract

Self-reported quality and duration of sleep in Western populations is declining. The interest in wearable sleep-trackers that are promising better sleep is growing. By wearing a device day and night the sleeper is continuously connected to a more-than-human network. The mass-adoption of sleep-tracki...

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Published in: CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Extended Abstracts
ISBN: 978-1-4503-9156-6
Published: New York, NY, USA ACM 2022
URI: https://cronfa.swan.ac.uk/Record/cronfa64928
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Abstract: Self-reported quality and duration of sleep in Western populations is declining. The interest in wearable sleep-trackers that are promising better sleep is growing. By wearing a device day and night the sleeper is continuously connected to a more-than-human network. The mass-adoption of sleep-tracking devices has an impact on the personal, social and cultural meaning of sleep. This study looks at the discourse forming around wearable sleep-trackers. This extended abstract presents how non-human subjectivities are accounted for in this discourse. Through a posthuman discourse analysis of textual and visual artefacts from interviews, academic research and popular media, six distinct roles for these non-human social agents were identified: ‘Teacher’, ‘Informant’, ‘Companion’, ‘Therapist’, ‘Coach’ and ‘Mediator’. This characterisation is a first step to understanding sleep-trackers as social agents, reorganising personal and contextual relationships with the sleeping self.
College: Faculty of Science and Engineering