Abstract
Ambient assistive technology (AAT) is envisioned as a powerful tool for facing the growing demands the demographic change toward an aging society puts on care. While AAT is often expected to increase the quality of life of older people, this paper holds that relevant interventions often embody values that can contradict such visions, and in some cases even be harmful to care receivers. We argue that the strong focus AAT puts on illness and risk management reflects a medical model of care, which often disregards the psychosocial challenges that impairments and disabilities associated with old age can rise. We suggest that design of AAT could benefit from using the social model of care as design inspiration and value foundation. Such an approach puts focus on the person rather than the illness. The paper ends by providing a short description of work in which the social model of care is adopted as a basis for design of AAT.
Chapter PDF
Similar content being viewed by others
Keywords
References
Muenz, R.: Aging and Demographic Change in European Societies: Main Trends and Alternative Policy Options. Number 0703 in SP Discussion Paper. Social Protection Advisory Service – The World Bank, Washington, DC, USA (2007)
World Health Organization. Global Health and Aging (2011)
Nehmer, J., Becker, M., Karshmer, A., Lamm, R.: Living assistance systems: an ambient intelligence approach. In: Proceedings of the 28th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2006), pp. 43–50. ACM, New York (2006)
Brandt, E., Pope, A.: Models of disability and rehabilitation. Enabling America: Assessing the Role of Rehabilitation Science and Engineering, 62–80 (1997)
Antonovsky, A.: Health, Stress and Coping. Jossey-Bass Publishers, San Francisco (1979)
Bannon, L.: Reimagining HCI: toward a more human-centered perspective. Interactions 18 (2011)
Friedman, B., Kahn, P.H., Borning, A.: Value sensitive design: Theory and methods. Technical Report 02-12-01, Dept. of Computer Science & Engineering, University of Washington, Washington, Seattle, WA (2002)
Friedman, B., Kahn, P.H., Borning, A.: Value sensitive design and information systems. In: Himma, K.E., Tavani, H.T. (eds.) The Handbook of Information and Computer Ethics. John Wiley and Sons, Inc., Hoboken (2008)
Borning, A., Muller, M.: Next steps for value sensitive design. In: Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2012), pp. 1125–1134. ACM, New York (2012)
Kitwood, T.: Dementia reconsidered: the person comes first. Open University Press, Buckingham (1997)
Ellul, J.: The technological society (Trans. Wilkinson, J.). Vintage Books, New York (1964)
Mowshowitz, A.: The Conquest of Will: Information Processing in Human Affairs. Addison-Wesley, Reading (1976)
Postman, N.: Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology. Vintage Books, New York (1993)
Ellul, J.: The Technological Bluff. Grand Rapids. Eerdmans Publishing Co., MI (1990)
Freier, N.G., Consolvo, S., Kahn, P., Smith, I., Friedman, B.: A Value Sensitive Design Investigation of Privacy for Location-Enhanced Computing. In: CHI 2005 Workshop on Quality. Exploring Wider Implications of HCI in Practice, Value(s), and Choice (2005)
Epp, T.D.: Person-centred dementia care: A vision to be refined. The Canadian Alzheimer Disease Review 5 (2003)
Dahl, Y., Holbø, K.: Value biases of sensor-based assistive technology: case study of a GPS tracking system used in dementia care. In: Proceedings of the Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS 2012), pp. 572–581. ACM, New York (2012)
Astell, A.: Technology and personhood in dementia care. Quality in Ageing 7, 15–25 (2006)
Baldwin, C.: Technology, dementia, and ethics: Rethinking the issues. Disability Studies Quarterly 25 (2005)
Astell, A., Alm, N., Gowans, G., Ellis, M., Dye, R., Vaughan, P.: Involving older peo-ple with dementia and their carers in designing computer based support systems: some methodological considerations. Univ. Access. Inf. Soc. 8, 49–58 (2008)
Donaldsom, J.M., Watson, R.: Loneliness in elderly people: an important area for nursing research. Journal of Advanced Nursing 25(5), 952–959 (1996)
Routasalo, P., Pitkala, K.H.: Loneliness among older people. Reviews in Clinical Gerontology 13, 303–311 (2003)
Hauge, S., Kirkevold, M.: Older Norwegians’ understanding of loneliness. International Journal Qualitative Studies on Health and Well-being 5 (2010)
Mathisen, B.M., Olalde, I., Kofod-Petersen, A.: Co-Living social community for elderly. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Innovative Internet Community Systems (2012)
Gulbrandsen, S.K., Fikkan, E., Grunt, E., Mehl, K., Shamsolketabi, S., Singh, J., Vrucinic, M., Mathisen, B.M., Kofod-Petersen, A.: Social Network for Elderly. In: Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Innovative Internet Community Systems (2012)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2013 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Dahl, Y., Farshchian, B., Kofod-Petersen, A., Bøthun, S., Holbø, K., Reitan, J.K. (2013). Ambient Assistive Technology Considered Harmful. In: Stephanidis, C., Antona, M. (eds) Universal Access in Human-Computer Interaction. Applications and Services for Quality of Life. UAHCI 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8011. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39194-1_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-39194-1_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-39193-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-39194-1
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)