Sensing a Heartbeat: A New Perspective on Self-Tracking Technologies through the Integration of Interoception

Fitness trackers are increasingly used by their wearers to monitor and optimise their exercise, health, and well-being. What is usually not considered is the role our interoceptive sense, the sense for inner-bodily processes, plays in the interpretation of body data and the formation of habits. By including neuroscientific research, perspectives from pragmatist philosophy, and science and technology studies into the analysis of self-tracking devices, this article will give a perspective on the scope and the effects of the involvement of the interoceptive sense in self-tracking practices. By offering a critical analysis of the contextualisation of experience through self-tracking devices, this article will argue that interoceptive awareness provides the context to make sense of body data. I propose here that paying greater attention to how interoception is involved in the mediation of bodily processes and activities through tracking devices can give novel insights into self-tracking as an embodied and affective practice.


Introduction
When Cary Wolf and Kevin Kelly introduced the term 'quantified self' (QS) in 2007, they started a movement that today has millions of followers around the world and high market value.The monitoring of the self that is promoted with this idea of the quantifiable self leads to the production and marketing of personal digital technologies that enable self-tracking, such as smartphones, smartwatches, and intelligent wristbands (Wac and Wulfovich, 2022).These devices have been touted as a means of promoting healthy habits.But not only does their impact on habit formation remain a topic of debate, but research has also suggested that the use of self-tracking devices can lead to body dissatisfaction and negative body image (Attig and Franke, 2019;Boldi and Rapp, 2022;Sharon, 2017).In addition, studies have shown that the images and metrics provided by these devices contribute to the objectification of the body (Quinn-Nilas et al., 2016).The new opportunities to document, monitor, and measure details of bodies through wearable devices prompts also new questions for media scholars that concern, for example, the conceptualisations of body-technology assemblages (Lupton, 2016), the mobilisation of communication (Paton et al., 2012), and value ascription to data (Sharon and Zandbergen, 2017).These discussions surrounding the influence of fitness trackers on our relationships with ourselves and our bodies often fall into one of two prevailing perspectives.On one hand, they can be situated within the framework of the Foucauldian control apparatus, depicting self-trackers as instruments of surveillance and regulation.On the other hand, an alternative viewpoint sees them as components of a more-than-human assemblage, fostering a novel association with technology.In this context, self-tracking is characterised as instigating 'dynamic sociotechnical arrangements' (Bode and Kristensen, 2015: 18), creating an intricate interplay between bodies, technologies, and selves (Lupton, 2016).Authors emphasising this potential for new modes of self-formation through technology often adopt a feminist new materialist perspective (Lupton et al., 2018).They introduce concepts such as 'feeling data' (Esmonde, 2019) to elucidate how the experience of data influences its interpretation, underscoring the inherent connection between data collection and visceral and experiential aspects (Esmonde, 2019).Furthermore, the materiality of data is emphasised, acknowledging that data are always construed as an integral part of an infrastructure, subject to database design and user knowledge (Pink et al., 2018).
In this article, I align with scholars who argue for digital self-tracking as an embodied and affective practice, emphasising the crucial role of interoception, our sense of inner-bodily processes.Moreover, I argue that the extent to which self-tracking technologies shape our self-experience hinges on the incorporation of interoception, and interoceptive awareness can be cultivated through technology.By exploring this dimension of sensual experience that is commonly neglected, but that is central to the way we make meaning of body data, I will expand the discourse on the potential for engaging in new assemblages with technologies such as self-tracking devices.I propose here that paying greater attention to how interoception is involved in the mediation of bodily processes and activities through tracking devices can give novel insights into the ways tracking devices impact lived experience.
By including neuroscientific research on interoception and perspectives from pragmatist philosophy in the analysis of different selftracking devices, I will first argue that all self-tracking devices involve the interoceptive sense because of the way they entangle bodies, technologies, and selves.Second, I will propose that the way self-tracking devices involve interoception impacts how the collected data affect the user's relation to the data collected about their bodies.I will show that this involvement of the interoceptive sense depends to a degree on the representation of monitored bodily activity.That is the creation of external representation, so-called data-doubles, versus symbolic representations of bodily processes that happen either in the form of visual cues or tactile feedback.While this differentiation may seem arbitrary, it serves me to articulate a difference between (1) a spatial and linear perspective on the body and its performance and (2) a temporal perspective, in which physical activity becomes part of a complex realm that involves emotions, affects, and motivations.While a spatial and linear perspective on the body through self-tracking is associated here with the framework of management and control in which '[n]umbers and visualizations are utilized to offer a valuefree hermeneutic, transforming life, in all its ambiguity and messiness, into controllable "life slices''' (Kristensen and Ruckenstein, 2018: 6), a temporal perspective on the body brings awareness to the unfolding 'visceral interplay with data, the becoming with data' (Mopas and Huybregts, 2020: 25).This distinction can be re-perspectivised by recognising the ways in which interoception integrates signals from internal body processes, emotions, visceral experience, and perception of the external world.
In order to think through the ways interoception is involved in this becoming with data, I will utilise John Dewey's concept of habit.In the face of the many conceptualisations of habit that complicate our understanding of embodiment (Blackman, 2013: 187), Dewey offers a concept that embraces the paradox of habit, 'where we are both open to influence but not continually confronting the world anew' (Blackman, 2013: 209).Dewey develops this understanding primarily in Human Nature and Conduct (Dewey, 2012(Dewey, [1922]]: 324), to describe how certain activities are at the same time influenced by predispositions and dynamic in nature.Dewey understood habit as the ongoing activity of an organism that creates and maintains a meaningful relationship between the organism and the environment which makes it useful to think through the ways we make sense of data about our bodies.The resulting re-evaluation of the biological dimension in the formation of habits I will further elaborate through Samantha Frost's notion of the attentive body.But first, I will give an overview of contemporary research on interoception.

Interoception and Its Impact on Our Relations to Environments and Emotional States
Chances are that the reader has never heard about interoception, and soon it will become clear why this neglect is so prevalent.Interoception is one of those senses that are particularly hard to place.This is in part because we understand, we 'see', ourselves as visual creatures.Our gustatory, olfactory, and interoceptive senses on the contrary are commonly deemed less important for our interaction with the world.But even among those secondary senses, interoception is particularly elusive.It does not belong to one sense organ alone but engages different sense modalities: Interoception is the perception of sensations from inside the body and includes the perception of physical sensations related to internal organ function such as heartbeat, respiration, satiety, as well as the autonomic nervous system activity related to emotions (. ..).Much of these perceptions remain unconscious; what becomes conscious, i.e., interoceptive awareness involves the processing of inner sensations so that they become available to conscious awareness.(Price and Hooven, 2018: 798) The sensations taken up by our interoceptive sense thus belong to a large group of processes that encompasses even seemingly different categories like organ functions and emotions.From a physiological perspective, it makes sense that we have only limited conscious awareness of these processes.If we, for the sake of clarity, take on a physicalist perspective, we can state that the function of interoception is to keep the body operational and able to act in the environment.Permanent awareness of all organic processes inside our bodies is neither necessary nor helpful in this regard.Yet, while a permanent awareness of inner-bodily processes would be problematic, at times, interoceptive signals do cross into our consciousness, for example, if we need energy in the form of food.
However, interoceptive awareness is not solely involuntary.While it is true that interoception is mostly unconscious, interoceptive awareness is thought to be cultivatable.Paying attention to our heartbeat or breathing seems to impact our judgements about other bodily processes as well, be it how hungry we are or where exactly that pain in the stomach is located and how to describe it.Training our interoceptive awareness, heightening our attention to how our body feels in a particular moment, can even impact our decision-making in everyday life based on how our body feels (Price and Hooven, 2018).One key term in this context is emotion-regulation.Emotion-regulation is understood as an attunement and adaptation to psychosocial as well as physical circumstances that ensure restoration and enable opportunities for action.Stress response is one activity in which the relationship between interoception and emotions becomes crucial.Here, interoception is involved in the detection and interpretation of physiological activities in response to stress, and it affects emotional states and ultimately behaviour in order to ensure homeostatic balance in the face of a stressful situation (Garfinkel et al., 2015).Generally, in scientific literature, heightened interoceptive awareness is thus associated with positive effects.A subject that is attuned to interoceptive information is thought to become aware of certain emotional or physiological cues early and thus able to interpret them more accurately.This might entail noticing satiety and avoidance of over-eating or control of negative emotions in social situations.So-called interoceptive dysregulation, on the contrary, has rather negative effects on one's well-being.Chronic anxiety, for example, often goes along with an interoceptive misinterpretation of physiological data.In such cases, an accelerated heartbeat signals danger no matter the reason.
However, interoceptive sensing and signalling processes are not without interruption or free from influence.They are part of a complex process of meaning-making and therefore object to change.As Garfinkel et al. (2015) point out, differences in sensitivity towards interoceptive signals might lead to different emotional styles, and particular patterns of emotional and behavioural response.And as Lana Kühle argued in her recent talk at the ISU Philosophy Colloquium 2022, 'multisensory perception which includes interoception brings forth two novel features to perceptual experience: meaningful contextualization and the tone of embodiment'.Kühle's further explanation of meaningful contextualisation calls forth Dewey's theory of habit as the ongoing negotiation of the organism-environment relationship, which I will come back to in the next subchapter.As Kühle has put it: Meaningful contextualization is the result of a process wherein the perceptual representation positions the external stimuli against the interoceptive stimuli in a particular way.By contributing information about the current states and needs of the body, interoception adds a necessary context that allows the exteroceptive sensory information to be integrated into the representational whole in view to motivate action.(Kühle, 2022) It is this particular context, that interoception adds to how we make sense of data, that I am interested in here.I argue that representations of data that involve different sensory modes and that do not require direct attention correspond more to the way interoception integrates sensory information (ambient signalling) than numerical or graphic representations of data alone.Contrasted here are tracking devices that use tactile or ambient feedback on one hand, and those that graphically display collected data over a longer period of time on the other.
To make sense of this comparison in relation to interoception, we need to better understand the role emotions and affects play in interoception, and the role we more generally understand emotion to take in the interpretation of sense data.In the past, emotions have been understood as resulting from bodily responses (James-Lange theory), as occurring at the same time as bodily responses (Cannon-Bard theory), and as an interpretation of bodily responses within a specific context (Schachter-Singer two-factor theory).Recently, scholars who represent an affective turn in theories of mind, such as Asma and Gabriel (2019), have promoted a more integrated understanding of emotions that encompasses their biological, cognitive, and cultural aspects.Mind, for Asma and Gabriel (2019), is an expression of a biological intentionality that is affectively and emotionally structured (p.44) and thus embodied.In order to specify the relationship between interoceptive awareness, habit formation, and emotions in the case of self-tracking practices, I want to bring the notion of biological intentionality as emotionally and affectively structured together with Dewey's theory of habit and Frost's writing about the attentive body.This allows me to articulate the role that interoception plays in the entanglements between self-tracking technologies and their users.

Self-Tracking in Light of Interoception-Dependent Habit Formation
Because Dewey ties habit so closely with the biological organism and its engagement with changing environments, his theory is especially fruitful for an analysis of the involvement of interoception in self-tracking practices and the significance thereof.First, it is important to note that Dewey (1994) understood organism and environment as enmeshed, a dynamic relationship through which both organism and environment continue to transform.Dewey also made no strong distinction between cognitive processes such as language and consciousness and unconscious and immediate sensory experiences.Thinking, feeling, and perceiving all happen as part of the continuously unfolding organism-environment relationship.For example, Dewey considered emotions as being felt throughout the body -inside the gut, the hands, and the heartbeat, thereby shaping bodily states as well as cognition.
Dewey's understanding of habit marks a break from the more traditional understanding of habit developed by early behaviourists.Here, habits were seen as mechanical behavioural responses of individual organisms, which led to a neglect of the concept in the postbehaviourist period (Crossley, 2013: 134).In Dewey, the association of habit with a mechanical response to external stimuli is then replaced with a more encompassing understanding of habit, in which habits are fundamental to our actions and deeply connected to our intellectual functions and emotions (Crossley, 2013: 151).In this understanding, a central way the organism manages to adapt alongside changing conditions are habits as they encompass different dimensions of experience, including internal bodily processes such as those I connected to the interoceptive sense.This broad perspective on habits continues on the behavioural level, as Dewey does not reduce habits to those routine behaviours one can observe.Far from mere reflexive responses, Dewey sees habit as a central mechanism to freedom (Crossley, 2013: 153).While habits are informed by socio-cultural conditions, they are the very foundations of our 'styles, patterns, and ways in which we engage our world.We are our habits; they are our very structure as corporeal, bodily selves' (Sullivan, 2000: 26).Thus, habits constitute our knowledge of the world and, as such, provide us with efficacy and agency in it.[. ..]To acquire a new habit is for the body to learn a new comportment of itself, one that opens up the meaning of one's world and provides one with expanded powers in one's world in a new way.(Sullivan, 2000: 27) To summarise Dewey's understanding of habits and to tie it more closely to interoception, the following three points are noteworthy: First, Dewey discriminates habits according to degrees of consciousness.There are internal habits that are basic biological processes, such as breathing.Then there are routine, unintelligent habits, which are routine behaviours one is not aware of, such as walking.Then there are intelligent habits that have a reflective, imaginative dimension.Intelligent habits such as cycling to work instead of taking the car involve a decision-making process.Self-tracking devices can mediate and impact internal habits in various ways.They may track our breathing, count our activity levels throughout the day, and prompt us to change those habits by, for example, adding breathing exercises or an afternoon walk to our daily routine.The use of selftracking devices can thus also lead to the change of habits, which relates to the second characteristic of habits according to Dewey, which is that habits are action-oriented and malleable.They enable an organism to act in changing environments.Third, in order to act in changing environments, the whole body of the organism must be engaged, including internal bodily processes that might require a change in inattentive or intelligent habits, and vice versa.For example, if I have been sitting at my desk all day, I might choose to walk or take my bicycle to do my chores instead of the car.Noteworthy here is that there are no clear distinctions between the aforementioned degrees of habit.As Dewey exemplifies this last point: [T]here is no absolute separation between the skin and the interior of the body.No sooner is the distinction drawn than it has to be qualified.As a matter of fact there is no such thing as an exclusively peripherally initiated nervous event.Internal conditions, those of hunger, bloodcirculation, endocrine functions, persistences of prior activities, preexistent opened and blocked neuronic connections, together with a multitude of other intra-organic factors enter into the determination of a peripheral occurrence.And after the peripheral excitation has taken place, its subsequent career is not selfdetermined, but is affected by literally everything going on within the organism.(Dewey, 1994: 333) The existence of these initiated events necessitates that there exists some kind of a pre-reflective intentionality of the human body, which serves the vitality of the organism as a whole.If we assume that interoception has a part in this intentionality, we can argue that interoception is indeed not a passive sensing of internal bodily processes but an active engagement with exteroceptive senses that is involved in decision-making processes, both conscious and unconscious.Interoception affects, for example, how we perceive and assess a situation.If we feel a bit under the weather, our interoceptive sense might make us perceive specific tasks as harder to accomplish than if we are energetic and well-rested.Interoception, as an internal habit, is thus decisive in the ways an organism adapts to its changing environments.
Thinking about the integration of interoception as such an internal habit in self-tracking devices brings Frost's concept of the attentive body into play, which she uses to examine how our bodies are not passive entities but active, sensory instruments that are deeply engaged in the processes of perception, emotion, and subjectivity.In the context of this article, her notion of index, which she borrows from Peirce's theory of signs, will be further employed to explain the role particular signs play in this engagement of the body with sensemaking processes.In Peirce's theory, the index is a sign that gestures towards a thing to which it has a causal or spatial relation.There is a causal relationship between the index and what it represents, such as a footprint in the sand.Indexical signs are not truth claims, they do not represent something as fact, but they point to or evoke something, and they direct attention to something without representing it.An indexical sign, Frost emphasises, has also an active component, when it, for example, draws attention to somebody's future.This connects in particular to the temporal context of the index, which must form a link with the subject's experience (Frost, 2020: 9).As such, an indexical sign always gives a spatial and temporal specification to the object to which it refers and this specification is always linked to the addressee, who, in order to make sense of the sign, has to connect it to previous experience (Frost, 2020: 11).For a hunter, a footprint from a deer might have a different meaning than for a casual hiker.In the context of self-tracking, as I will explicate later, an indexical sign could be understood as a signal that draws attention to a specific activity without representing it.The tactile feedback of a self-tracking device might refer to a specific milestone reached (e.g.step count) or biological processes (e.g.heartbeat exceeding a certain threshold).Referring to Eduardo Kohn's reflections on Peirce's theory, Frost stresses that the temporal dimension of the index connects the self to the 'realm of the possible' (Kohn in Frost, 2020: 10) by creating a link between the unfolding present and what might happen next.This sparking of an anticipation of something new can evoke action, prompting a response, and make the body attentive to what is about to happen.The hunter might interpret the footprint's freshness and calculate the proximity of the animal, depending on which they might change direction or pace while listening and searching for further signs of the prey.
I propose that this attentiveness of the body is closely connected to interoceptive awareness.Christopher Stephan has argued that anticipation indeed unfolds within a range of experiential modalities, accounting for physical sensations such as gut feelings without a particular source, a mooded perception of the world, and concrete imaginations about what is to come (Stephan, 2019).Interoception, as research has demonstrated, takes part in those facets of experience, as it allows us to make behavioural choices based on our physical state and the situation that we find ourselves in.With respect to anticipation in particular, a heightened interoceptive awareness has been linked to the anticipation of negative experiences that go along with emotional and affective states (Durlik et al., 2014).If self-tracking devices, by creating indexical signs that give the spatial and temporal context for particular experiences, make our body in this way attentive, we can assume that they also heighten our interoceptive awareness.In the next section, I will engage with different ways of using self-tracking devices and different forms of data presentation in order to better understand how self-tracking devices might impact interoceptive awareness.

Interoception and Ambient versus Numerical Representations of Data
Self-tracking technologies allow users to monitor organic processes such as heartbeat or breathing, or physical activities such as sleeping or walking over extended periods of time.Commonly, they represent changes or trends in the form of numerical data or graphs.This datafication of physical activity is said to allow users to gain knowledge about their own bodies and, if necessary, to develop new habits that in some way or other optimise an aspect of bodily performance identified through the self-tracking technology.However, not all selftracking devices use the same form of representation.Some monitor one's activity throughout the day and tell the user in the form of numbers and graphs how activity levels compare -to a self-set goal, previous days, or the statistics of other users.Other devices work with in-the-moment feedback.They track processes of our body like heartbeat or breathing and give haptic or visual feedback once a certain threshold has been reached, for example, if the heart rate accelerates beyond a certain point or a breathing pattern deviates too much from a pre-set rate that is considered preferable.
While there are many different dimensions in which wearable technologies can play a role, I will focus here mainly on contexts that focus on the measurement of heart rate, speed, or distance, as this focus lends itself to exploring the involvement of interoception.One context in which self-tracking devices are used, besides physical exercise, is in stress reduction.A variety of wearables offer a tool to monitor one's pulse, breathing, or skin conductivity in order to estimate stress response in everyday life.These technologies notify the wearer once physical data suggest a stress response.Over a longer period of time, this instant feedback is supposed to create awareness of the kind of situations that lead to a stress response, how to recognise the first indicators of stress, and how to counter-act.To enable this immediacy, these wearables provide information through visual or haptic cues.For example, a wristband such as the Apollo device vibrates in a 'soothing' way in order to calm the wearer throughout the day.The product description on the website highlights the active role that the wearable takes on in the user's life as it promises to 'improve' rather than 'track' the user's life.It does so by offering a symbolic form of feedback that differs from the numerical representation of body data, which would presuppose an analysing subject.Interestingly, the product advertisement does not describe the device as another tool for the self-determined subject, as it is at the centre of the QS movement.Rather, the attractive feature of the device as promised by the company is that just by wearing it, stress will be reduced and sleep quality improved, without any deliberate action needed on the part of the wearer.The product description suggests that it is precisely the seamlessness, the involvement of the unconscious, that makes the device attractive.
Other examples, such as the Lief wearable, involve a reflective component by alerting the wearer if body data differs from a target range.These self-tracking devices present body data in a symbolic or ambient way; they take on the form of symbolic reference to innerbodily processes, such as heart rate or breathing.Internal biological processes are thereby meaningfully connected with the environment and the situation the wearer finds themselves in.Thinking back to Frost's utilisation of Peirce's indexical sign to explore how bodies and environments relate not in a passive way but in the form of a response to processes that enmesh bodies and environments (Frost, 2020), we can understand ambient or symbolic signalling as such indexical signs.Self-tracking devices that notify the wearer symbolically and instantly about the exceeding of particular thresholds like heart rate or breathing pattern are in this sense indexical signs that draw the wearer's attention towards bodily processes as they are happening while suggesting that a change in behaviour, for example, slower breathing or pace, can change these very processes.The way haptic feedback technologies integrate interoception and thereby shape our attention and habitual response brings thus into perspective how life and meaning are indeed entangled (Frost, 2020).
What role do interoception and interoceptive awareness play in the engagement with numerical visualisation and representation of data in the form of graphs or so-called data doubles?To respond to this question, I will focus in the following on Boldi and Rapp's (2022) recent writing, which pays special attention to the impacts of self-tracking on 'body schema', 'body image', 'body awareness', 'interoception', 'exteroception', and 'proprioception'.While the acknowledgement of interoception in their observations is welcome, the authors do not properly articulate how interoception is involved in self-tracking through mobile devices.Furthermore, they miss the intermediate role that interoception has when they distinguish between representations people make of their own body (body schema, body image, body awareness) and the perceptive processes that concern bodily states, under which they subsume interoception.The fact that interoception has a mediating role between these two domains gives it particular importance in the discussion of the operationality of self-trackers that I intend to formulate here.Besides these shortcomings, Boldi and Rapp offer a good starting point for thinking about how the differences in the representation of body data affect experience in different ways.Boldi and Rapp (2022) examine how far the use of self-tracking devices fulfils the expectations of users to improve their awareness and knowledge and whether this informs their everyday decisions and identity (p.189).The authors collected data from 8 amateur athletes and 12 elite athletes who were using self-tracking devices for more than 3 months at the time of the study.One training goal for which the self-tracking device was deemed useful for all amateurs was help in keeping the heart rate within a specific zone.According to interviews, 'Amateurs agree that trackers can support the athlete in developing a greater awareness of her body, by prompting fixed measures to which compare those signals that are tied to a specific level of heart rate' (Boldi and Rapp, 2022: 198).The reasoning behind this positive effect, according to Boldi and Rapp, goes back to the evasiveness of inner-bodily processes and the inconsistency of our awareness of them.For amateur athletes, mediation of certain aspects of organic processes was thus felt to be helpful in contextualising their training experience.The elite athletes on the other hand reported that self-tracking devices tended to undermine confidence in their lived experience.Elite athletes, the authors explain, have gained over the years of training such a fine-grained understanding of their bodily signals that the representation of particular body signals (e.g.heart rate) outside the larger reference of lived experience runs the risk of obscuring their fine-grained body awareness.
To relate this observation back to my discussion of the cultivation of interoception, I suggest that the interviewed elite athletes have gained an interoceptive awareness that allows them to meaningfully contextualise all kinds of sensations.The fine-grained awareness of their bodily signals becomes part of a larger context of a meaningfully experienced training session.Considering this meaningful context of experience from a Deweyan perspective, we can emphasise the role that emotions play in this mix.For Dewey, meaningful experience comprises different layers of experience: organic, cognitive, as well as emotional activity.At the same time, these experiences are not excluded from the environment but are called forth by the various situations a subject finds itself in: Emotion in its ordinary sense is something called out by objects, physical and personal; it is response to an objective situation [. ..]Emotion is an indication of intimate participation, in a more or less excited way in some scene of nature or life.(Dewey, 1994: 390, emphasis in original) Emotions are thus fundamental to and an integrative part of the unfolding experience.But emotions do not remain on a pre-reflective, affective level; they also can initiate and inform processes of reflection that then may result in habit transformation (Petit and Ballet, 2021).
Dewey's understanding of emotions as integral to experience and as having direct implications on habit formation and learning more generally expands the discourse on emotions beyond narrow psychological versus biological frameworks.Self-tracking devices that are used to build habits, be it to become more active generally, reduce stress, or reach a training goal, undermine these categories in their own way.Dewey's pragmatist approach to experience thus offers to my analysis of diverse self-tracking devices an embodied, non-dualistic approach to habit formation that involves the whole organism, including biological, mental, and emotional processes.The sense that is fundamental for this integration, as I have argued here, is interoception.If elite athletes have an acquired interoceptive awareness, this enables them to be more attentive to the unfolding of their experience during training, as it encompasses inner-bodily processes, emotional states, as well as exteroceptive and proprioceptive adjustments.The question remains if amateur athletes who see a benefit in this kind of mediation would reach a similar sharpness of interoceptive awareness with more experience and if this would impact their use of tracking devices.Or if, on the contrary, the device stands in the way of achieving greater interoceptive awareness.As Boldi and Rapp report (2022: 119), in the view of one of the interviewed athletes, excessive use of self-tracking devices can in fact lessen the awareness of sensations through overly relying on the data.According to this interviewee, such athletes were unable to adjust their speed without a tracker.They could not follow the prompt to 'run slower' without external reference.In this case, the mediation of particular bodily processes through self-tracking devices seems to give only a partial and distracting perspective on the body (Patel and O'Kane, 2015) that cannot be integrated into a more encompassing sense of lived experience and thus gives the athlete an erroneous judgement of their performance if the tracking device is not worn.
What is echoed here in Boldi and Rapp's writing is a critique of the QS ideology, which perceives the human being as imperfect, whereby it is precisely the emotional, affective dimension that is considered as an obstacle on the way to self-knowledge and control.In this context, the observation, datafication, and instrumentalisation of the body through self-tracking devices is understood as a tool to overcome these limitations.As Boldi and Rapp (2022) put it: In QS rhetoric, technological devices can overcome the natural limits that people encounter when they seek to gain self-knowledge, like a poor sense of time, a limited, fallible memory, and cognitive biases that negatively affect the opportunities for collecting relevant information to make decisions.(p. 189) Looking at the human subject through the lens of interoception, any kind of neutral and objective comprehension of phenomena must quickly be deemed illusionary.As research on interoception shows, our perception is tainted by the state of our body, how much energy we have, our context of experience, and so on.It would then also follow that the data collected about physical performance is always interpreted by an emotional, interoceptively primed subject.The perspective on the body and the embodied subject that thereby is inevitably evoked is, in turn, diametrically opposed to the ideal of the body as endlessly malleable and utilisable through digitisation as espoused by the QS movement.Boldi and Rapp argue further that representations that are composed from abstract and scattered conceptions of the body, based on unrelated numbers, graphs, and depictions [appear] to not integrate into a coherent image that takes into account the body's complex nature made up of perceptions, proprioceptive sensations, and selfrepresentations.This may turn into biases and distortions of how we look at our bodies, worsening, rather than improving, our selfknowledge.(Boldi and Rapp, 2022: 190) While in this perspective it seems that self-tracking devices reduce interoceptive awareness and distance the wearer from lived experience, other approaches highlight the significance of emotions and visceral awareness in making sense of data (Kennedy and Hill, 2018: 2).This perspective is encapsulated in the notion of 'everyday engagements with data through visualizations', which evoke emotional responses and highlight the importance of the feeling of numbers (Kennedy and Hill, 2018: 2).Interoception could be seen as playing a pivotal role in making sense of data, a concept referred to as 'data sense' by Lupton (Lupton et al., 2018).The notion of 'datasensing' combines information gathered from data with a subjective, introspective evaluation of one's physical, mental, and emotional state to generate a more comprehensive self-assessment (Kennedy and Hill, 2018: 33).If we thus consider the numerical aspects of athletic performance alongside, not in lieu of, how individuals are feeling, interoceptive awareness might be involved in the interpretation of data between training sessions.In this account, data about bodies does not remain scattered and abstract, as Boldi and Rapp put it, but becomes part of new modes of self-formation through technology that includes the feeling of data and making sense of data in visceral, emotional ways.As Mopas and Huybregts (2020) report from their interviews of athletes, 'numbers pertaining to their athletic performance were not considered in place of but alongside and in conjunction with how they were feeling' (p.34).Datasensing thus implies the use of the information gathered from data 'in combination with a more subjective, inward-looking appraisal of how she was feelingphysically, mentally and emotionally -to generate a more thorough self-assessment' (Mopas and Huybregts, 2020: 33).And as Kennedy and Hill (2018) state, 'everyday engagements with data through visualisations evoke emotional responses that nuance the proposal that numbers alone are central to the logic of datafication.At the level of the everyday, the feeling of numbers is important' (p.2).It is thus this feeling for data, to which interoception adds a context, that allows us to integrate the data about physical activity into the representational whole in view to motivate further action (Kühle, 2022).
Interoceptive awareness might thus come into play at different moments of self-tracking.More precisely, if interoceptive awareness imparts knowledge through an indexical relationship between organic processes and emotions and sensations, then two moments in the process of engagement with body data can be identified.First and particularly relevant when using ambient or symbolic feedback, interoceptive awareness establishes a meaningful link between the unfolding of the experience, including visceral sensations and emotions, with the concrete situation in which the measurement is taken.By signalling that our heart rate accelerates, or our breathing flattens, the feedback device draws our attention to our internal habits without representing them.As an indexical sign, the device gives a spatial and temporal specification of our own experience, whereby interoceptive awareness allows us to make sense of it.The second way in which interoceptive awareness allows users of self-tracking devices to make sense of data is by retroactively contextualising it.Interoception comes in here on a level of habit formation that concerns intellectual habits and the engagement of the whole body in assessing a training session.The emotional response to everyday engagement with data (Kennedy and Hill, 2018: 2) and the 'subjective, introspective evaluation of one's physical, mental, and emotional state to generate a more comprehensive self-assessment' (Kennedy, 2018: 33) suggest a habit formation in the encompassing sense that Dewey developed.The relationship between self-trackers and the data they collect is thus evolving and becomes part of a complex realm that encompasses emotions, affects, and motivations.Interoceptive awareness might be the critical hinge in this process that provides a meaningful context for the interpretation of body data.

Conclusion
The main intention behind this article is to advocate for the recognition of interoception and how new technologies target our interoceptive sense within contemporary media studies.Through integrating interoceptive awareness, wearable devices impact our emotional states and how we perceive our body and the world.I exemplified this in a discussion of different self-tracking devices.Interoception is, at the same time, a set of biological processes that propel the organism to action through impacting emotions and perception and a biopsychosocial phenomenon, meaning it unfolds within a larger context that includes the biological constitution of the subject, their previous experience, and expectations, as well as the social environment.It is therefore difficult to isolate the interoceptive sense or to clearly define how it relates specifically to the use of self-tracking devices.But, as I have argued with Dewey's understanding of internal habits and Frost's notion of the attentive body, interoception plays a role in processes that connect body and environment in a way that directs attention and evokes anticipatory behaviour, which coincides with the purpose of using self-tracking devices to monitor habits and improve certain health-or fitness-related aspects.In this way and expanding on Frost's argument, we can assume that self-tracking devices that integrate interoceptive awareness, and thereby draw our attention to the ways our inner-bodily states respond to changes in the environment, help to capture the multiple ways in which our bodies are saturated with the social world, but also how biological processes create meaning out of these effects (Frost, 2020).Understanding the coupling of digital devices and bodies through interoception offers also an explanation for why self-tracking in some form continues even when the device is not worn (Clark et al., 2022).In the case that tracking devices help to cultivate interoceptive awareness, this awareness is likely to affect the wearer's attention style and sensitivity towards their body when not wearing the device.
Employing a theory of habit formation informed by Dewey's pragmatism and using Frost's rereading of Peirce's indexical signs for thinking about meaningful contextualisation as based in lived experience, I concluded that self-tracking devices can foster different styles of attention towards inner-bodily processes and thus to different involvements of interoception.By understanding interoceptive awareness with Kühle as providing the that allows exteroceptive information to be integrated into a representational whole and concretising this with Frost's attentive body as a link between subjective experience, local situation, and temporality of unfolding experience, I was able to identify two different ways in which interoceptive awareness becomes part of habit formation with self-trackers.In the case of symbolic or ambient presentations of data, interoceptive awareness seems to mediate in the event the device provides feedback and allows for increased attention to the specific moment the user is in.In the case of numerical presentations of data, interoceptive awareness seems to establish a link between the data and past experience and allows the user to develop new strategies and motivations for future actions.Overall, this study has shown once more that the relationship between technologies and users is more complex and involves different dimensions of experience.If we understand interoceptive awareness as the emotional and visceral tuning of the engagement with data that provides a particular context to further integrate the data into motivated behaviour, then it appears likely that interoception plays a role throughout the engagement with data, in whatever way it might be represented.An engagement with self-tracking devices and how they integrate interception allows us to reframe the relationship between our sensing body, technologies, and the environment as entangled and unfolding.