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Sleep by the numbers: human-centeredness and the immanent posthumanism of users
Journal article   Open access   Peer reviewed

Sleep by the numbers: human-centeredness and the immanent posthumanism of users

Sanonda Datta Gupta and John Seberger
AI & Society, Forthcoming
05 May 2026
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03059-w
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https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-026-03059-wView
Published, Version of Record (VoR) Open Access via Drexel Libraries Read and Publish Program 2026 Open CC BY V4.0

Abstract

Sleep tracking Posthumanism Phenomenology Personal informatics Human-computer interaction Sleep Studies
Human–computer interaction (HCI) continues to privilege human-centered paradigms even as interactive life unfolds under posthuman conditions, producing a latent ontological misalignment. Consumer-grade sleep-tracking technologies (CSTs) make this ontological tension especially visible: sleep is embodied yet exceeds self-aware experience, rendering it an instructive limit case for phenomenologically informed HCI research. To explore this tension, we systematically identified and analyzed a corpus of 120 peer-reviewed CST publications (2014–2024) across interdisciplinary venues, treating HCI sleep-tracking research itself as an empirical site. Through a critical interpretive synthesis, we analyze how sleepers are enacted through datafication, infrastructural coupling, and algorithmic interpretation. Our findings show that CST research materializes multiple posthuman figures cyborgian, nomadic, and agential realist even as HCI discourse continues to presume a coherent phenomenological subject. This posthuman multiplicity exposes a tension within HCI’s predominant phenomenological inheritance and necessitates engagement with a broader deconstructive lineage. Building on this analysis, we introduce a posthuman design constellation, an ethico onto epistemological tool for conceptualizing how multiple posthuman enactments co-exist within a single sociotechnical arrangement and challenge the presumptive singularity of the phenomenological subject.

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