Reassembling the elderly consumption ensemble: retaining independence through smart assisted living technologies

Abstract

Smart assisted living technologies are often touted as the solution to the challenges associated with an ageing population. Viewing elderly consumers, their relatives, and technologies as comprising an assemblage, this article aims to understand how smart objects actively reshape the everyday practices in families with elderly consumers. Interviews with and observations of users of smart alarm systems indicate a stratification of the paired experiences of users and systems and identify a tension between enabling experiences of the elderly and constraining experiences of the relatives. This article contributes to views of families with elderly as assemblages by providing insights into joint and disjoint consumer experiences in multiple consumer-object assemblages, identity negotiations of the elderly and their relatives, and the hidden costs of smart assisted living technologies.