Short abstract

Smart technologies in care homes aim to support older residents, but ethnographic research shows many avoid or work around them. Some technologies even increase dependence on staff. The study highlights challenges of ageing, digital exclusion, and the work involved of bypassing unwanted tech.

Long abstract

In Norway, as in many parts of the world, society is increasingly becoming digitalized. This is also so in care homes for older people, where a number of smart technologies and appliances, such as automatic lighting, home/away buttons, temperature control and induction cook tops are integrated. The aim is for the technology to support the older citizens’ self-management and independence for as long as possible, and thus prevent or delay moving to institutional care, which is very expensive. Increasingly, over the past decades, different actors have invested much money in building care homes, with close proximity to homebased services, as a measure of meeting the needs of a growing ageing population.

This paper is based on empirical data from two research projects in two different care homes and is focused on the residents’ use of the integrated technologies. Ethnographic fieldwork and individual interviews are conducted at both settings.

The findings show that many residents don’t use the technologies installed and use a lot of (often creative) resources in working around the technologies in order to avoid having to deal with them. Also, the results show that some technologies make the residents more dependent upon assistance than before moving to the care homes.

The contribution of the paper is twofold: it contributes with nuanced knowledge to the growing field of ageing and digital exclusion, and also, to make visible the amount of work involved in avoiding technologies that is not mastered, and finding alternative pathways of solving everyday issues.

Short abstract

This paper examines an AI fall-prevention device to show how "homemaking" is re-configured in the design practices. By analyzing practice-bound imaginaries, it reveals how designers pre-configure the home, navigating the friction between invisibilizing technologies and making new dependencies.

Long abstract

In the current digital transformation of welfare, Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasingly framed as a remedy for healthcare systemic deficiencies, often supported by "Aging-in-Place" imaginaries of home care. By examining the design of a fall risk prediction device, this paper argues that homemaking for older adults is actively reconfigured within design practices long before technology enters the home. This creates a fundamental tension between envisioned independence and new forms of data-driven dependency.

Moving beyond the analysis of top-down imaginaries of "Aging-in-Place", the research adopts the lens of "practice-bound imaginaries" (Hyysalo, 2006) to investigate how specific visions of care are locally generated and stabilized during the development process. The study explores the frictions and translations between these multiple imaginaries and the material practices of technology design.

The research draws on an in-depth case study of an Italian company developing a wearable device for evaluating fall risk. Through the analysis of interviews, participant mapping, and documents, the paper examines how developers "pre-configure" the home and the older adult in relation to the broader care network. By focusing also on the aesthetic choices made during prototyping, the study reveals how artifacts constructed as "invisible" actually reconfigure the sociomateriality of home care, embedding users into new infrastructures of preventive intervention.

Short abstract

Studying users’ engagement with internet based cognitive behavioral therapy (ICBT) through home visits gives valuable insights about reception, use and reluctance. In this paper the notion of ontonorms is used, to scrutinize how people living with anxiety and depression engage in iCBT from home.

Long abstract

Mental wellbeing is under pressure. There is a need for high-quality services to support mental thriving. The potential of internet-based cognitive therapy (iCBT) claims to have potential to reach many people at home in need of services but is still not fully unleashed. Based on home visits, this paper examines patient reservations, collaboration and reluctance while engaging in iCBT from home. We know that many people drop out of existing internet-based iCBT services because the services do not meet their requested need for help. To enlighten this, we debate ethnographic case studies gathered from thirteen home visits with patients receiving therapy for anxiety or depression. To address our informants’ values and engagements, we unfold three stories about what makes patients withdraw their engagement. We call these stories: entrapment, cynicism, and impatience. Correspondingly, we seek to understand what makes program cessation, and we argue that ethnographic studies and the notion of ontonorms help promote interface development in iCBT. Thus, we contribute to STS with what happens when users’ requests, interfaces and care contexts do not fit. This feeds into a debate about interface development and how to manage iCBT as an innovative and ethical practice. We discuss patients’ engagement with the iCBT platform, and we discuss how user interfaces and internet-based care services may be developed through ethnographic work and home visits.

Short abstract

Social and environmentally sustainable care is only possible by adapting existing buildings and through collaborative efforts. Taking a critical view on dominating ideas about socio-technical imaginaries we ask how could the future of care in adapted homes and engaged neighbourhoods look like?

Long abstract

Ageing in place means to remain living at home, with some level of independence, rather than in residential care. Considering the functional, symbolic and emotional attachments and meanings of homes, a home is not only a fixed, physical place but part of dynamic landscapes of social, political, cultural and personal change. It is therefore important to increase liveability, accessibility and the opportunity for social interaction and appropriate care in the private housing stock through timely adaptations of the living environment and the inclusion of in-home technological aids. Adapting and retrofitting existing homes in a functional and aesthetic way rather than constructing new buildings is the only social, economic and environmentally sustainable solution for the future of elderly care. Ageing in place based on age-friendly renovations and adaptations can be the collective vision of how to link social and technological solutions of care in the own home beneficial for the elderly and those around them. Taking a critical view on currently dominating ideas about socio-technical imaginaries we are asking how could the future of dignified care in timely adapted homes and engaged neighbourhoods look like? Based on findings from the ongoing project HOME, in which we aim to generate actionable insights manifested in the implementation of innovative technologies and care services we would like to foster discussion about the future of ageing in place and the collaboration of technology, aesthetics and care within it.

Short abstract

Welfare states deploy assistive technologies for aging populations, but UK and Norway homecare policies reveal a double move: immigration is shaped as demographic crisis while solutions assume a default, unmarked user, marginalizing migrant realities through inclusion, not absence.

Long abstract

Contemporary welfare states are investing heavily in assistive technologies to address impending crises of aging populations, and healthcare financing and infrastructure. This paper examines home care policy documents in the UK and Norway to understand how welfare technologies are articulated and configured within broader political and economic projects, and to explore where their rationales converge and where they diverge. Informed by STS scholarship on sociotechnical imaginaries and the performativity of policy texts, we treat these documents as enacting particular realities rather than describing them: creating the future as the location of problems and the home as the location of solutions. In this performative mode, we investigate how immigrants are enacted in policy, not as absent or invisible, but through a specific kind of inclusion. Despite contrasting economic and political aspirations, we argue that both policy landscapes perform the same double move: immigration performs demographic urgency while solutions embed technologies built around an assumed default user whose home, family structure and relationship to the welfare state reflects a particular, unmarked norm. This paper presents work in progress contributing to STS scholarship and renewed research interests on homecare technologies within welfare societies across transnational and migratory contexts.

Short abstract

Based on a study of two welfare technologies widely introduced in Danish long-term care, robot vacuum cleaners and virtual homecare visits, we explore how values of good care are negotiated, and how frictions related to homeliness, loneliness and dignity are evoked.

Long abstract

For more than a decade, ’Welfare technologies’ have been positioned as a key ‘solution’ in Danish policymaking addressing the crisis of care in the eldercare sector. Expectations from national and local policymakers are high, forming a very optimistic ‘sociotechnical imaginary’ of a withdrawn digitalized eldercare sector, providing both better and more efficient care for a growing population of older persons, and emphasizing ideals of freedom and dignity. However, this imaginary unfolds very differently in practise, evoking frictions and debates related to questions of homeliness, loneliness and dignity.

Based on a study of public discourse on two different welfare technologies, robot vacuum cleaners and virtual homecare visits, supplemented by field studies of long-term care, this paper explores how values and conceptions of good care are negotiated in relation to these two technologies. Informed by Jeannette Pols’ empirical ethics and incorporating aesthetic dimensions that illuminate material, performative, and discursive aspects, we argue that the withdrawal of physical care interactions through these technologies raises not only moral concerns but also aesthetic conflicts over what constitutes a good life. Yet the two technologies are received and portrayed very differently. Robot vacuum cleaners provoke widespread controversy and fundamentally alter how long-term care is spatially and socially organized. Virtual homecare visits, in contrast, are seen as a more acceptable reorganization of care services, and by some even portrayed as a service improvement. Yet virtual homecare visits also introduce profound transformations, changing notions of care presence and interaction through digital screens.

Short abstract

The introduction of assistive and domestic ageing technologies contradicts the autonomous ideal of “successful ageing” paradigm driven by the biopolitical governance of ageing. I show that rather than enhancing autonomy, these technologies reconfigure dependence and reshape the home experience.

Long abstract

In this paper, I present a grounded theory analysis of longitudinal textual and photographic data collected within the research project 'Aging Humans, Changing Homes' (led by Prof. Hummel) focusing on the reconfiguration of home after the introduction of a socio-technical “object of ageing”. The corpus consists of semi-structured interviews conducted with frail elderly people in the Geneva area (Switzerland/France) and Brittany (France).

Adopting a critical geography of ageing approach (Yu, 2025), I aim to highlight the paradox between the autonomy ideal of 'successful ageing' (Rowe & Kahn, 1997) driven by biopolitical governance of ageing agenda, and the everyday use of assistive and domestic ageing technologies, which lead to dependency. This contradiction challenges the socio-technical imaginaries (Jassanof & Kim, 2009) surrounding these objects, which are introduced into homes by external actors. Our data shows that, in order to use these technologies, stakeholders develop forms of dependence on relatives or care workers. This loss of autonomy is experienced as a loss of control over daily life and the domestic space itself, where the boundaries between the private and public space become increasingly blurred. However, ageing individuals regain a sense of agency by actively contesting this introduction. They also resist and subvert these technological objects through disengagement, modification or non-use (King & Woods, 2018 ; Yu, 2024 ; 2025). In doing so, they reshape the technological narrative of the socio-technical imaginaries and the experience of home itself.