ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how the use of information and communication technologies to allow older people to stay in their own homes rather than in hospital or move to residential care facilities creates many new possible interactions between occupants, building, and new devices. It introduces the notion of clutter moves as an experimental heuristic for tracing how movement threads together a range of cluttered entities in ageing home care ecologies. The book analyzes interactions between humans and robots, which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous. It examines how access to care is accomplished in medical settings by drawing upon ethnographic work in a UK regional teaching hospital of three settings in clinical medicine: Accident and Emergency, Medical Genetics and Intensive Care. The book provides a critical understanding of contemporary practices of care that cut through growing conceptual and methodological barriers between social and medical models of care studies.
