‘Build a future champion’: exploring a branded activity-tracking platform for children and parents

Abstract

This article explores a specific – but highly plastic – activity-tracking platform. Marketed to parents, ‘Milo Champions’ encourages the monitoring and rewarding of children, based on their activities and behaviours. The platform incorporates a popular Australian food brand – Nestlé’s Milo – and is designed for children aged between 6 and 12. Utilising walkthrough and software studies methodologies, the platform is traced by analysing app interfaces and online promotional material. Milo Champions is a niche example in the growing category of children’s activity-tracking apps: one that wraps masculinised logics of self-tracking around a multitude of parenting practices and envisages them, being deployed through feminised practices of caregiving. This article adds to prescient discussions about the ‘datafied child’ of the 21st century, and how health and wellbeing informatics are entangled with corporate interests.