A Short Commentary On: “Would John Dewey wear a Fitbit? A pragmatist analysis of self-tracking technologies’ impact on habit formation”

Within the Digitalisation and Transformation of Research (DiTraRe) project, Razum et al. [1] postulate that sports science research data fall under numerous legal and ethical precautions. These precautions apply, e.g. to the processing of personal data by wearable devices such as Apple Watches and applications such as MyFitnessPal when processed for research purposes [2]. Whilst wearable devices have their benefits for sports science research, we believe that it is important to approach them from the standpoint of a critical friend. This is because we consider the production of wearables to be mainly commercially, rather than research, motivated, and for this reason many ethical, legal and philosophical concerns have not been addressed.