eHPE: a history of the future

Young people’s uses of wearable healthy lifestyle technologies; surveillance, self-surveillance and resistance

“…Drawing on Wright and Halse (2014), the biopedagogical practices of the Fitbit thus worked to instruct, regulate, normalise, and construct an idea of a healthy young person as being active, fit and motivated to do 10,000 steps per day. Similar to cautions raised by Gard (2014), Powell and Fitzpatrick's (2015) and Depper and Howe (2017), daily step targets reproduced an idea that health was achieved through 10,000 steps, positioning the young people as being active or inactive, fit or fat, healthy or unhealthy, good or bad, or those who cared or didn't care about their health. Young people's attendance to and acceptance of this narrow interpretation that health equates to numbers and health is a behaviour that can be quantified (Gard, 2014;Williamson, 2015) is an issue that needs to be addressed in physical education, particularly if self-tracking will become an imposed practice (Luton, 2015).…”

“…To date, the point of reference for positioning healthy lifestyle technologies in education has been adult perspectives, that centre on two assumptions: (i) young people will be willing and able to use healthy lifestyle technologies to inform and regulate their behaviour; or (ii) young people will experience negative impacts on their health and wellbeing because they will adopt regulative and disciplinary behaviours (Casey et al, 2017;Gard, 2014;Luton, 2015;Petherick, 2015;Rich & Miah, 2017). Data from this study suggests that young people regulate their actions towards a norm of health equalling 10,000 steps, but in doing so they, at least short term, are encouraged to increase their physical activity levels.…”

Algorithmic skin: health-tracking technologies, personal analytics and the biopedagogies of digitized health and physical education

“…In his account of the agendas shaping physical education's future, Gard (2014) suggests that it is likely to become increasingly digitized, especially as new technologies of 'big data', surveillance, 'exergaming' and automation converge with current political, economic and public health imperatives. Some digital technologies are already well embedded in physical education curricula and pedagogies, such as fitness testing, movement analysis software, kinetic videogaming and digital pedometers.…”

“…To be clear, the article is intended as a response to Gard's (2014) provocation in this Research Forum section to consider how digital technologies might shape the future of digitized health and physical education-or 'eHPE' as he terms it. By engaging with recent critical literature on algorithms and exploring recent technical developments, it offers some critically informed speculations about the implications of self-tracking and the role of algorithms in shaping and governing the future of health and physical education.…”

“…First, as Evans and Davies (2014) and Gard (2014) have already argued, and reflecting wider shifts in educational governance (Ball & Junemann, 2012), health and physical education is increasingly being governed by a hybrid mix of commercial providers with business interests as well as government agencies acting on public health agendas. This mixing and networking of actors from the public and private sectors is all part of what Macdonald (2014) articulates as a characteristically neoliberal approach to the governance of physical education through diversifying resources, expertise and services locally and globally.…”