Rethinking Technological Solutions for Community-Based Older Adult Care: Insights from `Older Partners' in China

Aging in place refers to the enabling of individuals to age comfortably and securely within their own homes and communities. Continued community living creates a number of potential areas for design and, accordingly, various information and communication technologies have been employed to support older adult care. At the same time, human-led care services have been designed to support aging in place. Through a long-term ethnographic study that includes semi-structured interviews with 24 stakeholders, we consider these technology- and human-driven care infrastructures for aging in place, examining their origins, deployment, interactions with older adults, and challenges. In doing so, we reconsider the value of these different forms of older adult care, highlighting the various issues associated with using, for instance, health monitoring technology or appointment scheduling systems to care for older adults aging in place. We suggest that technology should take a ``supportive, not substitutive'' role in older adult care infrastructure and that designing for aging in place should not be synonymous with designing for independence but should, instead, consider the larger community and its dynamics.