News

New paper on the commercial promotion of blood pressure monitors and scales

2 August 2018

The latest output from the Tracking Ourselves? project is now available online as an article in the journal Critical Public Health, a publication that invites research critically exploring new ways of thinking about public health. The paper is entitled 'Constituting practices, shaping markets: remaking healthy living through commercial promotion of blood pressure monitors and scales'.

The article comes out of the first phase of our research, and looks specifically at commercial material produced around a sample of digital blood pressure monitors and weighing scales. We look at the promotional material developed for the sale of these devices, alongside the devices themselves, their packaging and design. The paper argues that companies operating in this space can be seen to re-work well-establishing practices like weighing and blood pressure monitoring to maintain connections to health whilst moving away from more explicit clinical associations.

A number of free e-prints of this journal article are available. For those whose institutions cannot access the article directly, get in touch with any of us for a pre-print version of the article.

Abstract

Commercial actors play a key role in promoting public health agendas as they move into space previously occupied by the state-sponsored health sector and welfare state. This paper examines how marketing of digital self-monitoring devices promotes public health. Existing self-monitoring research often separates or compares positions of commercial actors and users, using a discourse lens to examine commercial actors’ ‘expectations’ and ‘promises’, and user research focusing on ‘practices’.

The research on which this paper is based moves beyond this divide, examining commercial and user worlds through a practice lens. We draw on the research’s first stage which examined self-monitoring device marketing, arguing that marketing can be understood as constituting self-monitoring practices.

Much literature on self-monitoring focuses on novel networked devices, resulting in potential over-emphasis on change and innovation. Taking cases of well-established bodily monitoring (weighing and blood pressure), we set self-monitoring within a longer history.

We draw on Shove’s practice theory which attends to histories of practices and evolutions in practices required elements materials, meanings and competences. Commercial companies are shown to rework well-embedded practices as they constitute the practice elements of self-monitoring. They thus keep in play continuities and novelty, maintaining connections to health while moving away from clinical associations.

We argue that, in constituting self-monitoring practices as ‘aesthetic’, ‘enjoyable’, and ‘shared’, commercial actors address implicit resistances to negative connotations of ‘individualised’, ‘responsibilised’ consumer citizens implied in neo-liberal health-promotion agendas, widening the self-monitoring market and promoting public health by creating more desirable ‘lifestyle’ practices.