Paper short abstract:

We draw on ethnographic work with nine households taking part in ATTILA to examine in what ways and to what extent currently prescribed assistive technologies 'assist 'people with dementia or their unpaid carers with everyday life.

Paper long abstract:

Assistive technology and telecare are championed by British policy makers as the panacea to helping people with disabilities remain and retain functional capacity to complete everyday activities. ATTILA is an ongoing pragmatic randomised controlled trial which seeks to evidence whether people with dementia using current generation assistive technology and telecare in their own homes can delay permanent moves into residential care. We argue that the complexity of assistive technology requires significant insight into the everyday lives of service users in order to help determine its effectiveness or, indeed, how effectiveness is meaningfully created in situ. We draw on ethnographic work with nine households taking part in ATTILA to examine in what ways and to what extent currently prescribed assistive technologies assist people with dementia or their unpaid carers with everyday life. We suggest that carers and people with dementia not be framed as innovators of some imagined future of gerontechnology-mediated care. Rather their current experiences with simple, un-networked assistive technology is inherently innovative as these social actors act as bricoleurs engaged in adapting mass-produced devices to fit within their individual, lived socio-material realities. We critically reflect on our fieldwork to question what futures assistive technologies and other gerontechnologies may produce for dementia care in the UK. Where currently prescribed electronic assistive technology may introduce new challenges leading to their abandonment or require adaptation to appropriately match local needs, what hope does more sophisticated gerontechnology have for successful implementation in dementia care and who will decides its future acceptability?