Paper short abstract:

The Singapore government has devoted immense resources towards 'Smart Ageing' as part of its technologically saturated Smart Nation programme. I examine how residents engage with smartphone and home-based sensors, and how they affect well-being and social relations throughout the life course.

Paper long abstract:

The Singapore government has devoted immense resources towards 'Smart Ageing' as part of its larger Smart Nation programme, which seeks to use digital technology to transform Singapore into a smart city. Through the usage of digital technologies (in particular, smartphones and data-gathering sensors in the home), the Smart Nation project attempts to regulate and manage ageing and resident health. It also aims to export these digital health technologies to other nations. Meanwhile, residents use smartphone technologies to navigate ageing in their own ways. Based upon long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, I examine how residents engage with digital technologies in Singapore, primarily smartphone and motion-tracking home-based sensors, and how they affect resident well-being and existing social relations throughout the life course. Though targeted at the elderly, mobile health technologies involve multi-directional processes in which children monitor and communicate with their parents, report on their own health and exercise routines, and interact with doctors, nurses, and social workers. These technologies, while deeply situated in local contexts, are imagined by developers as globally exportable. They exist in a global context, as people in many countries are increasingly living well into old age, causing a rethinking of what living well itself means in people of all ages. I propose, in discussion with the ASSA team, that we can use our anthropological experiences in our individual fieldsites to understand changes in ageing globally, exploring a central focus of anthropological practice: movements between the specific and general, that both we and our informants undertake.