Session 03: How Older Adults’ Mobility Challenges Industry and Governments Visions
SESSION 03: MOBILITIES ACCESSIBILITY AND INCLUSION
This presentation delivered by Miguel Gómez Hernández and Berwyn Kwek was recorded at the 2024 ADM+S Symposium.
Older people moving in their homes: how older adults’ mobility challenges industry and governments visions
Miguel Gómez Hernández (Monash University), Berwyn Kwek (Monash University), & Sharifah Rose (Monash University)
As homes become increasingly automated, digitised, and operationalised, the concept of ageing-in-place for older adults evolves in parallel. The transformation into ‘smart homes’ sees the integration of an array of technologies that enable older adults to maintain independence and mobility within their own homes. Yet, crucially, automation also catalyses a broader shift in both industry and governmental strategies, pushing the policy paradigm towards a more technology-reliant approach, particularly in addressing mobility issues faced by older adults. This paper challenges the assumptions of this model, focusing on such transformations associated with mobility at home, in particular responding to falls. We argue that the desires and everyday lives of older people as they move and/or fall in their familiar spaces do not necessarily align with such technocratic visions, which often conceive of older adults as static data points. In this way, we problematise how automated technologies such as movement tracking and fall alert systems are redefining how older adults are expected to move and are monitored. Drawing on our ethnographic fieldwork in Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, we show these contestations by examining governments, industries, caregivers, and older people’s visions and meanings of desired ageing lives and expectations concerning mobility. We propose that older people’s everyday lives and ideas of mobility often challenge the socio-technical architectures of these systems, and technocratic futures currently envisioned by both policymakers and industry experts.