Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the implementation of domestic telecare assistive technology. It addresses the independence, mobility and emotional experiences of UK chronic heart failure sufferers. It also highlights the bodily and a-corporal dynamics involved in such residential health monitoring surveillance.

Paper long abstract:

Longstanding chronic illnesses are replacing the prevalence of disabling and fatal infectious diseases in the West. One such type consists of organic systems degeneration which includes most cardiovascular diseases such as chronic heart failure (CHF). Such conditions, associated with relatively high affluence and extended longevity, can often be regulated domestically. Since the UK presently has the highest proportion of residents over the age of 65 in Europe, the Department of Health has invested up to £80 million in providing telecare assistive technology nationally within 5 years. Introducing such systems into the home is meant to save time, bed-space and money for health services. At a participatory level, the rationale is to allow outpatients a greater control over their own condition and an emotional independence from institutionalisation. By recording their own weight and blood pressure on a daily basis as well as regularly responding to computerised health questions, there is an argument that CHF sufferers can become more aware of their own bodies and illness through telecare. Yet the concern over the reduction in human contact remains. Indeed, the counter argument even suggests that such initiatives increase the ways in which the gaze of medical surveillance is disembodying - delimiting our freedom and moulding patients into docile bodies. This paper explores the implementation of telecare in relation to the self-sufficiency of older CHF sufferers living in South Yorkshire. It asks how their independence, mobility and emotional experiences can be improved. Lifestyle monitoring, in the wider context of telecare packages, has recently emerged as an option to explore. But monitoring someone's lifestyle with sensor equipment is difficult to achieve for many reasons. The paper thus considers the issues involved in gauging people's daily routines by gathering sequenced information about their domestic use of objects and space. In examining the everydayness and physical experiences of living with such home-based medical monitoring schemes, we address the relationship between telecare lifestyle monitoring and the NHS's attempts at formulating Britain as a technologically dependant and increasingly virtual Welfare State. In these terms we shall focus on the bodily and, in particular, the a-corporal dynamics involved in the health monitoring surveillance of telecare. We also question the possibilities whereby placebo effects might arise through dwelling with IT.