Paper short abstract:

Telecare is transforming later life. From an STS perspective, we examine how social alarms are producing a new understanding and experience of home as a place to “age well”.

Paper long abstract:

"Aging in place" is one of the current paradigms fostering successful forms of later life. It states that people should be able to continue living in their own place of residence in old age. An emphasis is in the promotion of the house as the better place to stay as far as we age. As a result, a number of domestic modalities of care have been widely promoted. Telecare is one of them. It implies the introduction of ICT at home, with the aim of caring home users at a distance. These technologies are presented by their sponsors and providers as cost-efficient solutions to the problems linked to aging populations. However, they are doing more than making "aging well" possible. Our research on social alarms in Spain has shown that telecare actually transforms later life, as well as the place where it is supposed to occur. With the aid of ethnographic material, interviews and focus groups conducted in Catalonia, we examine how social alarms are producing a new understanding and experience of home. While psychological literature -and "aging in place" discourses- highlights the restorative nature of home, telecare provision requires the users to feel unsafe in their own household. Thus, paradoxically, telecare providers need the users to age in a place which is risky to them, and push older people to become sensitive to the dangerous conditions of their homes. The aim of our paper is to examine how this is occurring in our case of study.