Panoptic Parenting: The Biopedagogies of Wearable Infant Monitors
Location
CSU 204
Start Date
3-30-2018
End Date
3-30-2018
Description
Wearable infant physiologic monitors have become a new frontier in the proliferation of digital health tracking devices. Technological advances have made the devices less invasive and spurred rapid industry growth (King, 2014). Bonafide, Jamison, and Foglia (2017) observed: Smartphone applications (apps) integrated with sensors built into socks, onesies, buttons, leg bands, and diaper clips have the capability to display infants’ respirations, pulse rate, and blood oxygen saturation, and to generate alarms for apnea, tachycardia, bradycardia, and desaturation. (p. 353) However, medical professionals have critiqued the safety, accuracy, and effectiveness of these devices. I investigate how the rhetoric of infant health trackers creates a biopedagogy of resistance to medical expertise by normalizing and pathologizing maternal anxiety, while positioning digital surveillance as a rational response to ambiguous risk.
Panoptic Parenting: The Biopedagogies of Wearable Infant Monitors
CSU 204
Wearable infant physiologic monitors have become a new frontier in the proliferation of digital health tracking devices. Technological advances have made the devices less invasive and spurred rapid industry growth (King, 2014). Bonafide, Jamison, and Foglia (2017) observed: Smartphone applications (apps) integrated with sensors built into socks, onesies, buttons, leg bands, and diaper clips have the capability to display infants’ respirations, pulse rate, and blood oxygen saturation, and to generate alarms for apnea, tachycardia, bradycardia, and desaturation. (p. 353) However, medical professionals have critiqued the safety, accuracy, and effectiveness of these devices. I investigate how the rhetoric of infant health trackers creates a biopedagogy of resistance to medical expertise by normalizing and pathologizing maternal anxiety, while positioning digital surveillance as a rational response to ambiguous risk.
