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Self-care Technologies and Collaboration

In recent decades, Western countries have invested large amounts in researching and developing technologies for people with chronic conditions. Technology was often seen as the key enabler of a care reform that would shift chronic patients from institutionalised settings to the home, where they would self-care. However, promises were not realised and self-care technologies settled with a low uptake. Researchers associated the low uptake with a mismatch between the values incorporated in the technology and the everyday experience with a chronic condition. In this presentation, I contribute to that argument by outlining a mismatch in regards to collaborations in self-care. While my fieldwork with people living with Parkinson’s shows collaborations between patients and carers in the different self-care activities, self-care technologies often expect an individual user who manages by himself. Drawing on interviews, observations, and online ethnography, I characterise the self-care of Parkinson’s as a collaborative activity and draw implications for design to consider these collaborations in the design of self-care technologies.