Care to share? Social innovation through low-budget, high impact welfare technologies

The Western welfare model is under pressure and finding new ways of providing care is a key issue to maintain a reasonable service level for elderly people spending their last years at a nursing home. Personal care at nursing homes tends to (quite reasonably) have high priority at the expense of social activities, thus creating situations where a number of elderly people experience loneliness. This paper presents ongoing work that focuses on developing Information and Communication Technology (ICT) for nursing homes that brings together professional care activities and family initiated care. We discuss challenges and opportunities for welfare or assistive technology design to support articulation work in a care setting, where both care professionals and family members (of the elderly inhabitants) co-exists. Furthermore, the care sector at hand suffers from economical limitations that challenge a successful implementation of more costly technologies. We present a concept named Care to Share? that seeks to bring together professional and family initiated care and that assists in the articulation work of social activities in a nursing home.