Publication Type

Journal Article

Version

acceptedVersion

Publication Date

11-2020

Abstract

Increasingly, technology-enabled strategies of eldercare are being developed and deployed to minimize the socio-economic costs of ageing. As part of this shift, home-based ‘smart’ technologies have been embraced as a way of enabling ageing-in-place. Smart technologies flatten space and time, and can increase the reach of caregivers. In this sense, they foreground the emergence of new cultures of care. Through an empirical focus on the triallists of smart eldercare technologies living in a public housing estate in Singapore, this paper considers the ways in which new cultures of care are being formed and negotiated in response to the encroachment of smart technologies into pre-existing practices of caregiving. Specifically, it explores how the potential value of smart technologies can be undermined by the politics of responsiveness, and the dialectic of remoteness and proximity. To conclude, we highlight the need for understandings of smart eldercare technologies to be better situated within the varied socio-spatial contexts to which they are applied.

Keywords

eldercare, smart technologies, new cultures of care, ageing-in-place, Singapore, home

Discipline

Asian Studies | Gerontology | Science and Technology Studies | Social Welfare

Research Areas

Humanities

Publication

Social and Cultural Geography

Volume

21

Issue

9

First Page

1

Last Page

21

ISSN

1464-9365

Identifier

10.1080/14649365.2018.1550584

Publisher

Taylor & Francis (Routledge)

Copyright Owner and License

Authors

Additional URL

https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1550584

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