Quantifiable me
Candice A. Welhausen · Communication Design Quarterly · 2018
As fitness trackers have proliferated, many now collect information about both physical and mental health indicators. Arguably, such capabilities promote the notion that achieving and maintaining health is holistic, pushing back against the mind/body divide that has long characterized how we tend to perceive health and disease in Western cultures (see Segal, 2005). In this article, the author argues that the visual (photographs and data visualizations) and language-based communication strategies used on Bellabeat Leaf's website, a smart jewelry device for women, employ a narrative of holisticism. Further, this narrative functions as a rhetorical trope that reinforces power relationships that align with a dominant underlying ideology of Western medicine---the notion that disease and illness can be controlled. The author proposes that future designs of the Leaf's smartphone application might allow users to visualize quantitative and select user-contributed qualitative, sensorial-based feedback to potentially provide a more balanced perspective of health.