Welfare Technology and Surveillance in Care Work for Elderly Citizens

‘Welfare technologies’ are increasingly used in a variety of settings in the Danish welfare state (Mortensen 2015), where they are envisioned as leading to a new and smarter form of welfare state service delivery, promising increased efficiency, better quality, and citizen empowerment (Finansministeriet 2014). Based on two ethnographic field studies we discuss how selected technologies facilitate care and surveillance of citizens in different manners and with different consequences for care relationships between citizens and eldercare professionals. We focus on ‘intelligent floors’ in an eldercare center, as well as a technology facilitating ‘virtual homecare visits’ in a municipal homecare service.