ICT: solution ageing society?
Description
Politicians are promoting telecare as the solution to the problem of ageing and de-growth. With the help of telecare, they claim, chronically ill elderly people will 'manage themselves' and fewer professionals will be needed. On the other hand, technology pessimists argue that care will be impoverished and chilled if professionals introduce telecare on a large scale. Sick elderly people will breathe their last under the surveillance of cameras and sensors, far from human contact.
Neither grand promises nor inky nightmares have much to do with the practice in which professionals and patients actually work with telecare. This is evident from Jeannette Pols' research on the adventures of patients and nurses in a number of pioneering telecare projects. The combination of ethnographic methods and theoretical insights from science and technology studies and ethics, among others, yields surprising insights. For instance, telecare appears to make care more intensive rather than more sparse. The frequency of contact between patients and professionals often increases dramatically. The elderly are usually very satisfied with this, not because they can now finally manage themselves, but precisely because they feel safe and cherished by all that extra care via sometimes warmly loved devices. Sometimes they use telecare devices to care for each other instead of themselves. The study asks some tantalising questions about the future of telecare and how we might evaluate innovations in care without first investing millions in them
Speaker(s)
Jeannette Pols is Socrates Professor at the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at the University of Amsterdam. She is UHD and Principal Investigator at the Medical Ethics Section of the AMC
Location
Utrecht
Organiser
Philosophy & Technology
Name and contact details for information
Further information from drs.ing. Henk Uijttenhout (vz), tel: 070 - 3875293 / 06 - 26715554 or via the e-mail address below