GOOD AGEING: frictions in digital innovation initiatives for older people in Europe

In times of demographic change and crumbling health and care systems, governments, industry and public health care providers in Europe increasingly turn to digital health and social care innovations for providing care to older people. However, the digitalisation of ageing and care is not a neutral endeavour. Digital innovations often problematise elements in the lives of older people that are not evident, agreed-upon problems. At the same time, they also specify normative notions of ‘good ageing’, for example by promising to facilitate active or healthy lifestyles. The notions of good ageing that digital innovations introduce into the everyday lives of older people interfere with various other and sometimes conflicting forms of good ageing that the older adults also care about. In this dissertation I have studied such conflicts or frictions between different ways in which ‘good ageing’ is envisioned and done in four different digital innovation initiatives for older people in Europe: the development of a EU policy vision on the digitalisation of ageing and care; a Barcelona digital public service for the prevention and mitigation of loneliness; and two pilot studies in Italy and the UK, where one involved a public-private partnerships with a big tech company while the other followed a more bottom-up community based approach. These four digital innovation initiatives vary significantly in their aims, approaches, actors and (power) relations, and I consider how this influences what kinds of frictions arise and how frictions are accommodated. Drawing on literature from Science and Technology Studies, Ageing Studies, and Socio-gerontechnology, I analyse instances of frictions to answer the question: how do, in the context of an ongoing digitalisation of ageing and care, some forms of ‘good ageing’ come to matter more and how are others rendered invisible or marginalised? In this dissertation I argue that, if digital innovations are to facilitate forms of good ageing that older people themselves actually care about, and thus, if they are to be used on a wider scale, it is time to take frictions between different forms of good ageing more seriously than current digital innovation initiatives tend to do.