Paper short abstract:

This contribution aims to examine how care holds a central place in home aging and reveal the limitations of the systems supposedly ensuring the continuity of autonomy. The Swiss telealarm system is turning the home into a space for care and surveillance, questioning the ways of “aging in place”.

Paper long abstract:

In Western Switzerland, keeping the elderly at home is now a consensual social project, widely supported by the public authorities. The success of the "ageing in place" policy is due in part to the standard of autonomy it embodies. It is accompanied by a reconfiguration of the care provided to the elderly as they age.

My doctoral thesis looks at the telecare system, a means of assistance that is being integrated into the homes of the elderly. The aim of this contribution is twofold: to examine how the principle of care holds a central place in the context of ageing at home, and to reveal the limitations of the systems proposed as ways of ensuring the continuity of autonomy. With materialist gerontology, we are enabled to see the relational processes that shape the experience of ageing and the transformation of the home.

For this qualitative research, interviews were conducted with people over 65 with a telealarm system at home. The aim was to identify how people 'do home with care' in the presence of technologies that blur the boundaries between the private sphere of the home and the public sphere of health, turning the home into a space for care and surveillance. By studying the dynamics of appropriation or circumvention of the telealarm by the elderly, this research is an opportunity to rethink the role of technology in developing or undermining a comfortable life at home for elderly people, from their own point of view.