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Paper short abstract:

Against the backdrop of growing concern over the "care gap" in elderly care, robots are rising as a promising technology in South Korea. However, robots can fill a very specific kind of care gap that is only effective when the human care work is understood as a series of technical tasks.

Paper long abstract:

Declining birth rates are a global problem but it is more problematic in South Korea. In 2019, South Korea's total fertility rate reached 0.92 births per woman, which continues to be the lowest among the OECD countries. Facing the super-aged society that will come in the near future, different attempts are being made to solve social problems with technological measures, robots being one of them. Against the backdrop of growing concern over the "care gap" in elderly care, which allegedly results from workforce shortage, robotic care is rising as a likely scenario for the future. With the COVID-19 pandemic, robots have gained momentum as a provider of contact-free care.

Based on the ethnographic fieldwork of Hyodol, a South Korean personal toy-robot for the elderly living alone, this paper examines how the aspirational rhetoric of "closing the care gap" contributes to the development, distribution, and use of the robots for elderly care in public healthcare services. By offering various healthcare and entertainment services, Hyodol is expected to serve as a companion for the elderly who are supposedly lonely and depressed. Since its first release in 2017, around 5,000 units have been distributed to individual homes of the elderly nationwide, mostly with public funding. Arguing against the beliefs and rhetoric accompanying technochauvinism (Broussard 2018), we point out that robots can fill a very specific kind of care gap that is only effective when the human care work is understood as a series of technical tasks.