Hard-Earned Glimpses: Using GPS Tracking in Dementia Care

Abstract

Global Positioning System (GPS) tracking is a common tool used to prevent and handle situations where people with dementia get lost. Based on ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish, public nursing home, we explore the use of GPS tracking in everyday dementia care from the perspective of care workers. GPS tracking is a technology that promises a type of effortless and safety-enhancing surveillance. Meanwhile, our observations indicate that GPS tracking in everyday care situations depends entirely on care workers attending to the technology in physical and relational ways. Our analysis highlights how the technology in that process is re-shaped from a promise of smooth surveillance to a reality of hard-earned glimpses into the location of residents wearing the trackers. Drawing on the terms maintenance and repair work, we argue that care workers use GPS tracking with a high fidelity to the idea of the technology as safety-enhancing, and that this motivates the ongoing attention and adjustments necessary to make the technology function. We contribute to STS scholarship on the necessary, local adjustments of technologies by suggesting that efforts to make technology work in practice can be fueled by a technology's goals and expectations rather than stand in contrast to them.