Digital Ageing. Home-based Care Technologies for Senoirs

• Applicant: Dr. Monika Urban
• Subject Area: Empirical Social Research
• Term: from 2018 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 404124401

The project aims at reconstructing the practices with home-based health technologies of seniors. The undertaking focuses on those technologies, which promise to disburden the needy outpatient and home care system: Monitoring technologies for chronic conditions and Ambient Assisted Living Technologies. The study is designated to qualitatively evaluate the technological structures and its actors with their goals and estimations of problems on the one part. For this purpose qualitative interviews will be conducted. On the other part, the digital practices will be observed in their particular social contexts. This will be done through participatory observations and thematically structured interviews. Taking into consideration that ethical, health related and social risks are mentioned frequently in the literature, two aspects shall be considered: First the question is raised as to how the living arrangements for the elderly are effected - due to the new visibilities. Since the technologies are mostly implemented as risk assessment technologies, the study will survey the feeling as well as requirement of safety plus the leeway of the elderly and their relatives. Second, the new challenges of a care-at-a-distance shall be investigated. Those new care arrangements require the seniors to actively manage their own (ill) health. Furthermore those arrangements revise the demands for a functioning care relationship. The objective of the project is to map out the social, ethical and health related effects of the digital practices on the processes of ageing, the changing social relationships, on diagnosis, therapy and care work under the conditions of the German health care system.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants