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How does biosensing reach into the lives of older people living at home? Here we examine care monitoring systems for older people, or telecare, as this has become known. We focus in particular on the wearable falls detector, an alarm device which triggers, it is claimed, when a person trips or falls. We explore findings from ethnographies of home telecare and from citizens’ panel debates on how individuals and families live with such systems, and how falls detectors are constructed as workable. Following individuals' interactions with telecare we question the notion of self-tracking, preferring the term dys-tracking as better reflecting their relationship with automated devices. Falls detectors are technically highly complex, collecting data difficult to interpret. Ageing bodies are invariably assessed as low functioning and intrinsically at risk. Views from our citizens’ panels however, show a more active and imaginative constituency where practices of self-care exist alongside remote-care systems.

Biosensing in all its forms has strong connections to the promise-horizon of the ‘soon.’ But stories of failure, disappointment and limitation abound. We need to bring the body – or the bio in all its senses – full centre when discussing biosensing platforms. Moving across the life course - from childhood, through the so-called ‘reproductive years’ into older age, we have highlighted the significance of geographical, historical and social location. Biosensing may be about health for many people but as yet has little to do with biomedicine. Yet it has the potential to change human bodies and lives, in barely imagined ways. Policy makers and practitioners of all kinds could do well to devote time and resources to listening to and engaging with ‘the word on the street,’ as filtered through social science. People of all ages and backgrounds are thinking about, using and/or encountering biosensing, and they have much to say about it.

This chapter draws on Benjamin’s discussion of accelerating mechanisms of image capture and distribution in the early 20^th Century as a lens through which to view the contemporary acceleration of data and self-quantification. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork within the Quantified Self community, it suggests that self-tracking data constructs and fixes experience through the selection and recording of what is and is not counted. It argues that the commensurability of data works at a conceptual level to move beyond the individual person and the idiosyncrasies of both the data projects and the data collection streams, becoming stories in which we both render and recognize ourselves in new ways. Finally, it questions whether these new modes of self-rendering in which commensurability moves from epistemology into ontology signifies a domain shift analogous to, and as significant as, the movement of art into politics and economics documented by Benjamin.

In this chapter, I situate the book’s findings about modeling, embodiment, and technology in the debates about affect stirred up by the age of the blink. It considers the theoretical ramifications of imaging regimes, glamour labor, digital culture, affectivity, and technological changes in early 21^st century. Placing questions raised by looking at modeling work and its cultural impact addresses debates about the differences between affect and emotion. The chapter also treats debates in neuroscience about affect and affect studies, discussing the theories of Massumi, Thrift, Leys, Ledoux, and James-Lange.

This chapter considers the ways that embodied aging may be produced through wearable self-tracking technologies. With physical activity now promoted as key to the prevention of many age-related problems, and as inactivity becomes framed as irresponsible, the market for devices to both measure and motivate activity has expanded. While research in the biomedical and exercise sciences focuses on how self-tracking devices can enhance interventions aimed at behavior modification with older adults, this chapter draw on interviews with older users to argue that we need to attend more carefully to how the data produced by self-tracking circulates through the networks of technologies, relationships and regimes of expertise that are embedded in everyday social worlds.

Chapter 8 explores the ethical challenges presented by today’s emerging technologies for digital surveillance and self-tracking. Keeping technomoral virtues such as honesty, self-control, flexibility, justice, and perspective in view, this chapter examines ideals of transparency and control in contemporary discourse on the new world of dataveillance that enables a sousveillance society, one in which even the watchers are watched. Moreover, our lives are increasingly shaped by self-surveillance, self-tracking, and nudging, practices borne of wearable digital monitors and other ‘smart’ devices that let us analyze virtually every aspect of our bodies, our habits, and our days. These new modes of seeking the good life, crystallized in the emerging “Quantified Self” movement, are contrasted with traditional methods of self-examination and cultivation. The former are shown to promote a dangerously impoverished view of self-care and improvement, one that bypasses the genuine potential of surveillance technologies to promote human flourishing.

Today, machines observe, record, and sense the world—not just for us but also often instead of us and indifferently to our meaning. The intertwined problems of technological knowledge and (our) knowledge of technology manifest in the growing industry of smart machines, the Internet of Things, and other means for self-tracking. The automation of the care of the self is buoyed by a popular fantasy of data’s intimacy, of machines that know you better than yourself. Yet as the technology becomes normalized, the hacker ethic gives way to a market-driven shift in which more and more of “my” personal truth is colonized by machines (and the people behind the machines) that I cannot question.