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Paper short abstract

This paper examines remote biometric monitoring in functional neurological disorder (FND) research. It argues that wearable sensors and digital self-reports transform patients’ everyday lives into continuous data streams, extending neurological observation and experimentation beyond the laboratory.

Paper long abstract

Functional neurological disorder (FND) is the current medical designation for heterogeneous symptoms — including seizures, paralyses, and sensory disturbances — historically labelled hysteria and often assumed to have disappeared. Now recognised as a common yet still vaguely understood conditions FND has become the focus of intensifying medical research since the mid-1990s. Much of the research into this still-contested disorder relies on laboratory-based neuroimaging studies seeking to identify symptoms’ underlying neural mechanisms, which remain elusive.

Recently, a new FND research strand has begun to supplement laboratory experiments with remote monitoring technologies to track and quantify patients’ symptoms in everyday life. Using wearable sensors and commercial devices such as Fitbit, these studies aim to identify FND’s psychobiological correlates in real-world contexts. Such studies continuously record patients’ physiological parameters (heart rate, physical activity, sleep patterns) and repeatedly assess their affective states through digital self-reports. Participants’ adherence to monitoring protocols is also tracked and evaluated.

Based on a close reading of a recent study, this paper examines how such studies extend neurological experimentation beyond the laboratory into patients’ homes and daily routines. I argue that these protocols configure patients, wearable sensors, commercial data infrastructures, and self-report interfaces into biometric research infrastructures that transform everyday life into continuous streams of medical data. Central to these studies is a problematic imaginary that sufficiently dense streams of heterogeneous data will make FND legible. By translating sensations, emotions, and daily events into biometric measures, these protocols expand neurological observation and medical surveillance into the domain of everyday life.