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Paper short abstract

CGM is not just self-tracking. Comparing France and China, I show how reimbursement vs limited coverage shifts glucose monitoring from clinics to kin. Using policy documents and Chinese social media, I argue “kinship-based participatory surveillance” blurs care and control.

Paper long abstract

Continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) is often framed as a neutral device for individual “self-management.” I approach it instead as participatory surveillance: glucose sensing becomes a shared practice, organized through institutions, platforms, and everyday relationships.

A comparison between France and China helps clarify what is at stake. In France, reimbursement rules and clinical eligibility criteria largely keep CGM within professionalized care. Based on policy and reimbursement documents, access is negotiated through prescriptions and follow-up routines, and interpretation is expected to remain tied to the health system (endocrinologists, diabetes nurses, pharmacies). Some monitoring labor is redistributed beyond the household. In China, where public coverage remains limited, CGM is often put together through intergenerational arrangements. Adult children may buy sensors, set up apps, and translate dashboards into advice for parents across distance—not simply as “filial piety,” but as a moral response to uneven public provision and uneven data literacy. Kinship works as an infrastructure of anticipatory care and shifts interpretive authority: who gets to define risk, decide when to intervene, and imagine “metabolic futures.”

This participation is not seamless. Family monitoring can trigger negotiation, selective silence, or deliberate disconnection. Empirically, I combine document-based comparison of reimbursement regimes with exploratory digital ethnography of Chinese social media discussions, tracing how people post glucose screenshots, talk about costs and brands, and narrate “low-sugar” living together with family oversight. I call this dynamic “kinship-based participatory surveillance” to show how wearables redistribute care, authority, and stigma under chronic uncertainty.