Aging & Social Change: Ninth Interdisciplinary Conference

Abstract

Technologies designed to allow for older adults to “age-in-place” safely and independently have experienced tremendous growth in the past five years (Orlov, 2019). Prominent companies that have emerged with ‘smart home’ devices for the older adult include CarePredict, Sensara, Billy, TruSense, Essence, LiliSmart, and Presence Pro Care. While many of these companies include devices that are also marketed to younger adults, such as thermostats, doorbells, and voice-activated hubs like Alexa and Google Home, they also, more significantly, add into their purview home sensors that are designed with a function unique to this demographic: the monitoring not of the home but its inhabitants. Drawing on Kim and Jasanoff’s (2015) notion of ‘sociotechnical imaginaries’, this paper explores the imagined spaces of aging in place with home sensor technology. Examining the promotional materials of a selection of home sensor technologies marketed to older adults and their caregivers, I highlight the kinds of homes, inhabitants and users that the devices evoke in their conceptual design. These devices, I argue, reconfigure the home into an active participant in the management of its inhabitants and care into an act of remote and constant surveillance by algorithms. As new policies emerge to assist older adults in their ability to stay in the home, we need to be more critical of the increasing turn to smart home technologies by taking into consideration the problematic assumptions that are imagined into their design and the many social, material, and emotional consequences of their adoption.