Recent years have seen an influx of technologies aimed at enabling older people to remain at home. Remote monitoring is one such technology. By tracking the body as it moves through time and space, remote monitoring enables a care connection which transcends the physical boundaries of the home. Based on 43 interviews conducted with 21 older people trialling remote monitoring, this study critically explores how older people integrate (or not) remote monitoring into the material and symbolic fabric of their homes. Drawing on the concept of domestication alongside materialities of care, we explore the active ways in which participants make sense of, and incorporate, remote monitoring into the intimacy of their homes. We find that domesticating remote monitoring, an apparently mundane and ordinary object, is a complex and conflicting process which has consequences for the ageing body. Through its domestication, remote monitoring occupies an ambiguous symbolic and material position at the intersection of public and private. While the rationale behind remote monitoring is to minimise physical risk, we find that its proximity to intimacy and its capacity to ‘monitor’ everyday practice poses symbolic and social risks to people's sense of home and their identities.

Our findings highlight how ageing bodies are mediated and reconfigured through these technologies and how ageing bodies are potentially viewed as in decline and/or risky. Remote monitoring was viewed as a ‘safety net’; however, acknowledging that safety was a concern, simultaneously positioned participants as ‘at risk’, a category associated with decline and dependency. Once incorporated into the home, the technology represented an ‘active ageing’ gaze which, through its imagined capacity to judge, risked disrupting the flow of everyday routines; it elicited a heightened awareness of otherwise taken-for-granted practices. Despite this, for some participants, remote monitoring was appropriated to enact care for others, a way to alleviate the emotional labour of family members, and thus refute normative assumptions underpinning remote monitoring about older people as passive recipients of care. Remote monitoring is not passively incorporated into the domestic setting. On the contrary, older people actively assign symbolic meaning to it.

近年来，旨在帮助老年人留在家中的技术不断涌现。远程监控就是这样一种技术。通过跟踪身体在时间和空间中的移动，远程监控可以实现超越家庭物理边界的护理联系。这项研究基于对 21 名尝试远程监控的老年人进行的 43 次采访，批判性地探讨了老年人如何将远程监控融入（或不融入）其家庭的物质和象征结构中。借鉴驯化的概念和护理的实质性，我们探索了参与者理解远程监控并将其融入其家庭亲密关系的积极方式。我们发现，驯化远程监控这个看似平凡而普通的物体，是一个复杂且矛盾的过程，会对衰老的身体产生影响。通过其驯化，远程监控在公共和私人的交汇点占据了模糊的象征和物质地位。虽然远程监控背后的基本原理是最大限度地减少人身风险，但我们发现它的亲密性和“监控”日常实践的能力对人们的家庭感和身份构成了象征性和社会风险。

我们的研究结果强调了如何通过这些技术来调节和重新配置衰老的身体，以及如何将衰老的身体视为衰退和/或有风险。远程监控被视为“安全网”；然而，承认安全是一个问题，同时将参与者定位为“处于危险之中”，这是一个与衰退和依赖相关的类别。一旦融入家庭，这项技术就代表了一种“积极老龄化”的目光，通过其想象的判断能力，有可能扰乱日常生活的流程；它提高了人们对其他被视为理所当然的做法的认识。尽管如此，对于一些参与者来说，远程监控被用来为他人提供照顾，这是减轻家庭成员情绪劳动的一种方式，从而驳斥了远程监控将老年人视为被动接受者的规范假设。远程监控并不是被动地融入家庭环境中。相反，老年人积极地赋予它象征意义。