Conceptual approach for new routes in eHealth: Movement practices of elderly care

CareMoves is a research project focused on movements in old age homecare.

It is led by Peter A. Lutz, PhD Research Fellow at the IT University of Copenhagen. It is based on ethnographic fieldwork in the United States and Sweden, two countries that face the demographic challenge of an ageing population.

Movement helps center a number of important challenges and emerging tensions in old age homecare. These include moving from home into a care facility, everyday mobility – e.g. getting from A to B – as well as the timing, spacing and acting of homecare delivery. Movement is often understood in literal terms. However it also involves figurative dimensions such as the link between movement and independence, care as emotional movement and the sense of social connection engendered with IT devices.

In this project movement is positioned as an ontological heuristic to empirically explore how tensions surface in the field of old age homecare. This includes how tensions are entangled with movements situated by homecare trajectories (the sites, actors, plans and actions). One practical ambition is to contribute scientific knowledge that informs IT design and policy interventions aimed at alleviating tensions in care. It also aims to construct novel theoretical intersections between anthropology, science & technology studies (STS), human-computer interaction (HCI), design and care science.