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Paper short abstract

When a social robot enters frailty diagnosis, authority over bodies becomes distributed and contested. In the frictions between algorithmic and clinical gazes, new ways of producing, classifying and governing fragile bodies emerge.

Paper long abstract

This study examines how skeletal tracking biometrics reconfigure the clinical gaze in automated frailty diagnosis, drawing on focused ethnography of a pilot experiment using a social robot in a Barcelona primary care centre. A social robot equipped with a skeletal tracking camera was deployed across 19 individual sessions with older adults using an adapted standardised frailty test. Rather than seamless automation, what emerged was a terrain of contingency and improvisation through which new, distributed forms of bodily administration were being actively negotiated. Tensions between the robot's vision and the clinician's gaze open up new configurations in which authority becomes distributed and new hybrid ways of seeing emerge among robot, users, and professionals.

A revealing case is that of Mrs. Rosita: the camera erroneously detected a loss of balance that no one else observed, yet she accepted the robot's verdict and reinterpreted her own bodily experience accordingly. This moment illustrates how robotic data do not merely measure frailty but participate in producing it. Beyond mere measurement, the robot's feedback positions it as an authoritative element that actively produces new frameworks for understanding and administering bodies.

Through the robotic automation of frailty diagnosis, the clinical gaze is reconfigured, bringing forth new visions of what it means to be frail. We attend to how these technologies reshape norms of able-bodiedness among older adults, redistribute epistemic authority between human and algorithmic actors, and raise pressing questions around consent, autonomy, and accountability when patients internalise robotic verdicts about their own bodies.