Who Takes Care of Technology?: The Invisible Labor of Infrastructuring Digital Technologies in Aged Care
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Despite technology's pervasive integration into aged care to address aging populations and labor shortages, its deployment often overlooks the critical role of care workers who shape the experience of care through technologies. This paper presents a four-month ethnographic study at a long-term residential aged care facility in Singapore, involving 37 staff members from frontline workers to senior management. We examine how they adopt, implement, and use three distinct digital technologies at different stages of maturity in the delivery of care. Adopting an infrastructuring lens, our findings, presented through six affective vignettes, reveal the invisible labor involved in ''patchworking'' technologies implemented in a top-down, fragmented manner as well as the significant impacts on workers' liability and professional agency. The discussion unpacks the invisible burden of organizational unpreparedness in technology integration, the resulting negotiation of care work's meaning and power differentials with care workers for decent work.
DOI: 10.1145/3799455
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W7146988353