Abstract
This paper explores the historical and cultural evolution of breath as a site of technological intervention, tracing its transformation from ancient practices to contemporary wearable devices. Rooted in early medical techniques such as tracheotomy and inhalation therapies, breath management technologies have long mediated the boundary between body and environment. With the industrial era came the development of anesthetic delivery systems and mechanical ventilation, expanding the ways breath could be measured, controlled, and supported. Today, wearable technologies such as respiratory sensors and mindfulness apps continue this lineage, reframing breath as a quantifiable and governable process. Using a critical technocultural approach and speculative design as a method, this research examines how bodies, devices, and interfaces historically constructed the mediation and measurement of breath, culminating in the contemporary landscape of embodied computation. It investigates the ethical, social, and infrastructural tensions that have persisted across eras: between open and closed systems of access to bodily data, between public health and private monitoring, and between human needs and machine design. By historicizing breath as both a biological necessity and a technological artifact, this study highlights the ways societies produce technologies—and how, in turn, technologies reconstitute bodies and subjects. Ultimately, the project invites a rethinking of contemporary breath-based wearables not as isolated innovations but as continuations of long-standing architectures of control, care, and computation embedded within the human experience of breath.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
BREATH, TECHNOLOGY, BODIES, DEVICES, EMBODIED COMPUTATION, MEDIATION, MEASUREMENT, WEARABLE TECHNOLOGIES
