ABSTRACT
Many interesting assistive robotics have appeared in health care the latest years. Such innovations involve different forms of participation of citizens and professionals with their own implications and affordances. The initiatives have in common the fact that they involve elements of self-care and that they subscribe to the international trope of active citizenship. By way of material semiotics and the notions of ‘assemblies’ and ‘inscriptions’, the chapter untangles different kinds of engagement with feeding assistive robotics by taking a closer look at how disabled users and care providers use the robotics. The focus is particularly on what these assemblies mobilize, how they distribute agencies and what they imply in terms of active citizenship for the user. The chapter contributes to the STS literature by delineating what success is and what failure is, not in science and science studies, but in the politicized field of welfare technology and human-robotics interaction. The question of success and failure relates to opportunities of assistive robotics to bring forward the agendas of active citizenship and self-reliance. An interesting observation is that feeding assistive robotics not only offer care for the disabled users, but also for the care providers. Except for obvious successes as one of the discussed cases, the robotics does not appear as an obvious choice to mobilize active citizenship. Although the robotics is intended to fit neatly into the users’ everyday life, in practice, however, it leads to a number of unintended consequences that renders the implementation of feeding assistive robotics a crumble story.
