ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the ethnographic research project and analyzes the socio-material relations in the use and distribution of assistive technology in Denmark. In Denmark, disabled and elderly people are able to receive domiciliary care and assistive technologies from the municipality. Many assistive technologies are thus not designed to assist the disabled but to meet the requirements for health care practice and assist the nurses. Designing assistive technologies demands that developers, designers, care providers and politicians acknowledge the complexity within which assistive technologies are to be used and applied. In interviews with domiciliary care people, they often mention that some disabled persons cannot understand what the technology can do for them, and they meet the assistive technologies with skepticism. The dwelling is a hybrid entity, but for some disabled people, their dependence on many different assistive technologies makes their houses resemble an aggregate of machinery.
