The Quantified Self: Analyzing the Sleep Quality Monitoring Application Snail Sleep

Introduction

With the unceasing development on the digital technology, a variety of tasks can be conducted that are unprecedented in before. Such evolution allows people not only to be more capable in their daily life and work, but more importantly render them to have a better knowledge of their own self. To that term, health-tracking applications and devices are seen as an emerging trend in the digital consumption market. Admittedly, although there are different voices on the health self-tracking applications in terms of their efficacy and potential ethical issues, health self-tracking does bring change to people’s life in an unprecedented means.

To understand those self-tracking apps and devices, it should be noted that the essence of them is data, that is, they tell the users about their self-status in the scientific language of data. However, what needs to be further investigated is that, what senses are the data making and whether they are making a positive impact. By zooming in on a sleep quality monitoring application named Snail Sleep, the researcher conducts a virtual ethnography and relevant interview on it revolving round one research question, that is, is sleep quality self-tracking application changing people’s sleep quality for the better? Underneath which, a series of sub questions are explored in the ethnography within this topic.

Methodology

The method that is adopted in the study is ethnography and qualitative interview. As a research method that belongs to the realm of anthropology, ethnography is based on the result of field research in order to give certain description about culture so as to comprehend and explain a social phenomenon within theoretical views (Lillis, 2008). Qualitative interview targets to draw insightful and dimension answers from the interviewees by asking them qualitative questions, while the disadvantage of it may lay in that it is difficult to generalize the result within a set of rigid standards (Anyan, 2013).

In total of 5 participators were involved in the 10-minute session ethnography and all of them were required to experience on their on the app of Snail Sleep to track their sleep status for 3 days, before they took part of the virtual ethnography, which would be conducted via Wechat group call. The virtual ethnography would focus on their experience and reflection of the app that include thinking and examination on its ethical issues.After the virtual ethnography was conducted, I chose the one respondent who was most expressive with ideas to do a few more one-on-one 30 minutes’ interview to delve more aspects in order to answer the research question. The questions would be curated and mainly follow the key agenda as follows:

Do you think that the app is (not) useful? In what ways?
Do you regard the data to be (not) important? In what ways?
Do you think you gain a better self-knowledge after using it?

To avoid potential ethical issue, an email was sent to the participants prior to the research explaining the purpose of it, stating that the alias would be used to protect their private information and the research data would be destroyed once the paper is submitted.

Literature Review

Understanding Digital Device and Its Value

Digital device and apps are not strange to the audience of today who are digital natives. To sum up the definition of which, as elaborated by Borgmann (1999), digital device is often applied as a means to reach a certain end. According to Borgmann (1999), the purpose of digital device is to relieve the human burden where a digital paradigm focuses on the realization of good life that is in accordance with one’s values. On the other hand, Borgmann (1999) tended to suggest that digital technology does not increase value and thus cannot be used to contribute to the quality of a good life while as digital devices are getting to be more and more universally seen, it become quite important for people to re-examine what is good and fit their value in a digitalized society.

As digital technology has gradually become the overriding context that people find themselves are in on a daily basis, it provides people with unprecedented convenience whereas on the same time it creates certain difficulty to access to the values that are held by people since the digital power becomes already dominant (Borgmann, 1999). Therefore, what is argued here is the digital device’s value and the self-realization of human or ordinary users, since the former, which should be secondary sometimes overwhelms the subjectivity of the latter.

The Practice of Digital Culture, Focal Things and Focal Practices

In that sense, the concern brought up by Borgmann (1999, p. 10), simply put, is that the practice of digital culture may very likely contribute to the excessive reliance on the devices as people tend to forget that they are merely tools to provide certain services and consumptions, rendering it to be an ingrained part of human value in return. It is where that Borgmann (1999) tells apart the differences in the two concepts of focal things and focal practices. Focal things are usually more concrete, deep and tangible that possess their own structure and tradition; and thus, focal things can sufficiently provide a center for practice and that it literally becomes the origin of one’s values. It is because of focal things that focal practices are derived from, and it is focal practice that the added value of one’s life can be generated.

There is already much knowledge about the focal things in all kinds of technical report and analytical articles whereas the focal practices where the perspective of human users are involved in, are oftentimes less explored. For instance, Chughtai (2020) pointed out a fact that is often overlooked that in literature review relevant to digital culture, that there are abundant of them deciphering and conceptualizing digital technology per se whereas there is little to showcase the perspectives that people hold towards digital and information technology.

While Heideggerian may start from the description of a sort of human existence from a technological worldview since the latter can be used to describe the situation of the former, Borgmann (1999) tried to pinpoint that human factors play a vital part in the device paradigm concept, rendering to the fact where the means is distancing from the ends, which is to say that the reasonability of ends does not justifies that of means and vice versa. In that context, the means is the digital device and the end is the healthy status of oneself. In that process, human endeavor may be overshowed by that of digital capability. At the meantime, Turkle (2011) also indicated that when a digital device or application is able to conveniently provide a certain service, for instance, instant message, people will thus normally ignore the value by which they live.

As stated by Lupton (2019), relevant study results indicate that no matter how long that the users have been self-tracking their health status, the practice of them has already turned into a sort of habituated selfhood. In other words, focal things overwhelm focal practices since the device or apps plays the integral part of the focal things instead of the human initiatives. Moreover, the monitoring practice and strategy can be highly complex since the tracking involves a range of mathematical calculations that need to be deciphered in usually 20 mins to 1 hour (Lupton, 2019). Such process to certain extent proves the complicated assemblage of human and technology since people feel that they need to get more knowledge of their body on one hand and that people ultimately are subject to the technology in order to gain self-knowledge on the other hand.

Findings about the Health-Tracking Apps

As stated by Lupton (2019), the overall medical and health application market is getting more and more popular as can be indicated by the download volume that has climbed drastically within the past few years. According to Lupton (2019), the health-tracking digital devices and applications are considered to be emerging technologies that can help people to reach the aim of self-care and enhancing the fitness status either physically or psychologically. However, despite the fact that the health-tracking apps market is seeing tremendous prosperity, it still remains to be largely unknown that whether the apps prove to be useful to some people or fail for some others, as well as what are the functions that encourage people to continue using the apps and devices (Piwek et al., 2016). General findings are, as revealed by Accenture Consulting (2016)’s relevant data, fitness, diet and nutrition apps are those most popular ones, followed by symptom and heath-tracking ones.

Sharon & Zandbergen (2017) provide an account to understand health-tracking device as a sort of data fetishism, since people are highly reliant on the data to tell whether their health is in a satisfactory status or there are some areas need to pay more attention to. It is eventually based on those data that individual data users make plan in order to improve or maintain their health. Therefore, Sharon & Zandbergen (2017) argue that more work needs to be made in order to comprehend that from what aspects self-tracking can be more meaningful and valuable. On the other hand, Sharon & Zandbergen (2017) also admit the importance of data since it is data that helps ensure something is reliable instead of solely as a sort of intuition or feeling. The scientific aspect of numbers and data assist people to learn about the truth while the over-emphasizing on data, as worried by Sharon & Zandbergen (2017), may result to the disappearance of the complex world comprised of the entire human being, society and the corresponding environment.

Data Presentation and Analysis

As can be seen from the literature review, health-tracking apps have become an emerging trend of the market while the exact value of it may be argued, rendering the research to be quite necessary to be taken. The following shows the data provided by the participant towards the main questions orchestrated in the interview. Before elaborating about the result of the research, the backgrounds of the interviewee should be indicated. I focused on an one-on-one interview with Jane (pseudonym), a 28-year-old female. Passionate about using health tracking apps, she had used Snail Sleep before accepting this interview.

The Usefulness of the App

When asked whether Snail Sleep is useful for your life, Jane ’s answer to this question is “interesting” or “informative” rather than “useful”. The interviewee seemed fascinated by how to use this method to quantify her sleep quality in different dimensions, but she did not provide enough concrete evidence to show whether the application is useful for her.

“I felt it to be interesting to see all these numbers to describe my sleep duration, turn overs and sleep latency. In particular, the app also recorded a short part of my dream talk, which was so funny. It did give several data sets to compare with peers’ average situation so that I could have a big picture. It is useful in a way that it lets me know what I have not known before, but as I have been only using for a few months, it is hard to say whether it is useful.”