New cultures of care? The spatio-temporal modalities of home-based smart eldercare technologies in Singapore

Abstract

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.