When digital innovation meets the human body: Bodily digital devices and technosomatic entanglements

Across healthcare, wellness, gaming, and professional training, bodily digital devices—such as bionic exoskeletons, smart implants, or force-feedback systems—are becoming more prevalent. Unlike most digital technologies that primarily inform behavioral change or mediate experiences, bodily digital devices are directly coupled to the human body, sense and algorithmically process bodily signals, and materially actuate changes in users’ bodily states and physiological processes that can be both beneficial and harmful, intended and unintended. We develop a systems-theoretical account of bodily digital devices and their relationship to the human body and explain how ongoing device–body interactions produce different forms of technosomatic entanglements that reconfigure users’ agency and introduce new forms of dependency. Our work provides a starting point for studying existing and emerging digital technologies that increasingly intervene in humans’ bodily existence. Our theorizing is grounded in empirical insights from interviews, secondary data, and exploratory vignettes, and is iteratively refined through inductive and deductive reasoning.

Subjects

Bodily Digital Devices

Technosomatic Systems

Structural Body-Device Couplings

Technosomatic Entanglement

Inductive Theorizing

Deductive Theorizing

DDC Class

005: Computer Programming, Programs, Data and Security

600: Technology

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When digital innovation meets the human body: Bodily digital devices and technosomatic entanglements