Access and use of running self-tracking data for public health

This ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowship is a twelve month grant that gives an opportunity to those in the immediate postdoctoral stage to consolidate doctoral research and establish themselves as Early Career Researchers.

This fellowship explores research about digital wellbeing and digital inclusion in running. Starting running is increasingly recommended as a UK public health intervention (McGuinness, 2019)  but - because running is a metric driven activity - and to be fully inclusive everyone needs access to technology to track their running and the skills to use  and share the data they generate safely. 

In this fellowship, I propose to develop better understanding and proposed solutions to digital wellbeing and inclusion problems raised in my doctoral  research through achieving four objectives. 

• Objective 1: Academic impact through publishing my research on the  effects of self-tracking technologies on runners. This accounts for 50% of the fellowship

• Objective 2: Undertake co-produced research with communities to better understand the problem of inclusive and safe use of self-tracking data for improved public health. The new research aims to develop further co-produced research grant capture in collaboration with UK health bodies and social inclusion organisations through establishing a new academic research network within the University of Sheffield (HealthSPA-ICT Research Network). This network aims to bring together researchers at all career stages interested in physical activity, sport, and health that incorporates information communication technologies in those practices to work toward co-produced research grant capture.

• Objective 3: Public engagement of doctoral and postdoctoral research to increase awareness of effects of self-tracking technologies on runners. 

• Objective 4: Research-related personal development which will not feature on this fellowship project website.  

The project will also establish