Technological Care: Health Professionals’ Discourses on Technology in Home-Based Services Seen Through a Capability Approach

Abstract

This article is a contribution to the reflection upon what forms of assistive technologies societies should provide to users of home-based services. The material is collected from five focus group interviews conducted in Oslo in 2016 as part of a research project into assistive technologies with the purpose to gain knowledge of how such technologies were used in the home-based services. The interviews are analyzed on the basis of Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach in order to see what forms of technologies influenced the users’ capabilities. Thereafter, the technologies are classified as either public or private technologies in order to see what forms of capabilities the public care for and which technologies that are in the domain of private initiative. Based on the focus groups, it seems that public technologies are targeted at bodily health and integrity, while private technologies on communication and infrastructure, with some notable exceptions. The paper ends with discussions on the seemingly paradoxical situation that publicly supported technologies aim at the private sphere while the privately acquired technologies focus on public activities.