The Shifting Sands of Labour: Changes in Shared Care Work with a Smart Home Health System

Title of the Paper

The Shifting Sands of Labour: Changes in Shared Care Work with a Smart Home Health System

Paper Information

• Subject Area: Impact of smart home technology on elder care work
• Keywords: Smart home, elder care, health technology, shared care, technological labor, data work, human-computer interaction, emotional labor, technology adoption

Research Background and Problem

• Issues or Challenges:

  • With the increasing aging population, many elderly individuals require higher levels of care from their families and society.
  • Smart home systems are gradually becoming an important technology to support independent living for the elderly, but more research is needed to explore their impact on the nature and amount of family caregiving work.
  • Current smart home technologies are often designed for individual users and do not adequately consider the needs of shared caregiving in different family structures.

• Significance:

  • Whether smart home technology can optimize caregiving work and reduce unnecessary burdens is a critical aspect of addressing the challenges of an aging society.
  • Understanding how technology affects family caregiving and caregiving labor is essential for improving care quality and technology design.

• Research Motivation and Related Work:

  • Existing research primarily focuses on how technology assists elderly individuals with health monitoring, neglecting the impact of caregiving activities on family and societal members.
  • Related work has explored the influence of social smart devices in households but has not sufficiently revealed the dynamic changes in family caregiving labor caused by technology.

Solution

• Proposed Solution:

  • This study deployed a Smart Home Health System (SHHS) in five households and explored its impact on the nature of work for both elderly individuals and caregivers through interviews and observations.

• Innovative Contributions:

  • Systematically examined how SHHS technology changes the types of "labor" involved in family caregiving, including Learning and Set-Up Work, Maintenance Work, Interaction Work, Data Work, Care Work, and Emotional Work.
  • Proposed design recommendations to reduce the burden of technological labor and support shared family caregiving.

• Implementation Steps and Key Technologies:

  1. Design and Deployment of Smart Devices: The SHHS system included multiple sensors (e.g., smartwatches, weight scales, motion sensors) and a voice assistant, integrated with an online data dashboard and mobile application.
  2. Data Collection and Interview Study: Conducted a three-phase interview process (before device installation, short-term experience after installation, and long-term evaluation after three months) to collect real interactions and feedback in caregiving contexts.
  3. Qualitative Data Analysis: Used NVivo software for thematic analysis to identify labor types and influencing factors related to family caregiving.

Research Findings

• Specific Findings:

  1. Increased Technological Burden: Users had to invest significant effort in learning, setup, maintenance, interaction, and data processing, while the system design did not fully account for the needs and complexities of multi-user households.
  2. Identification of Labor Types:
     • Emotional Work: Anxiety and additional communication costs arising from technical errors or incomprehensible features during caregiving.
     • Data Work: The labor-intensive process of acquiring and interpreting sensor data for family users.
     • Self-Management and Shared Care Work: While the system partially helped track health status, the additional maintenance tasks significantly increased labor costs.
  3. Reasons for Technology Adoption and Abandonment: Some families gradually abandoned the SHHS due to the system's complexity and lack of technical support, which led to high maintenance and learning costs.

• Comparison with Existing Solutions:

  • Unlike traditional smart home systems designed for individual users, this study focused on shared caregiving experiences in multi-occupant households, revealing a broader range of labor cost types.
  • Provided deeper insights into the processes of technology adoption and abandonment, offering practical evidence for optimizing smart home design in the future.

• Experimental or Evaluation Results:

  • Family users felt that the system's setup and maintenance work exceeded their capabilities, and long-term use did not reduce labor intensity.
  • Users expressed a significant need for the visualization of "black box" data.

• Limitations and Future Directions:

  • Limitations: The study sample was concentrated on middle- to low-income white families in a single city, which may not fully represent a more diverse user group.
  • Suggestions for future research:
    1. Explore user experience differences across various social and cultural contexts.
    2. Conduct design workshops or co-creation activities to develop customized smart home technologies that meet shared caregiving needs.
    3. Collaborate with the healthcare sector to evaluate the technology's support for professional caregivers and medical practitioners.

Conclusion

This study deployed a Smart Home Health System (SHHS) and analyzed its impact on family caregiving labor, revealing changes in labor types within shared caregiving. The research emphasizes the need for technology design to focus more on lowering learning and usage barriers, supporting the complex dynamics of multi-user sharing, and addressing the emotional and sociological factors involved in technology adoption. The study also provides practical recommendations for reducing the burden of technological labor and designing user-friendly caregiving systems, offering important insights for the future development of technology-assisted elder care.