In the last 30 years, the computer and internet technologies have restructured medical and care practices fundamentally. It assembled a working process how doctor, caregiver and patient align next to or in front of the computer or other high-tech devices for diagnosis, consultation, therapy, and care. This project goes beyond the existing role of the material “computer” as an assistance to diagnosis and therapy. What kind of healthy autonomy and more social interaction of the single elderly people can generate the evolving field of robots, assisted living systems, and ‘smart ageing’? Opening up new spaces and providing materials for aged peoples, can the computer and other devices be an answer to the ageing challenges that the societies of East Asian and Europe confront?

       There are many technological projects that try to improve “ageing in-place” or at home, with technological solutions as ambient assisted living systems, robotics or ICT (information and communications technologies). These studies show how additional medical technology can help the elderly to stay at home. However, in this current research lies an implicit and unquestioned bias on home care. Devices stabilize that patients are treated as in-site patients without the direct interaction with caregivers: It confirms the role of the patient and deepens medicalization and social isolation. This trend seems to oversee that elderly should be enabled for more social interaction. This project challenges that somewhat structurally conservative or even static conception of “home” or “in-place”. Further, it also challenges the restricted focus of smart ageing as a technology of care and a relief for the care-giver. Instead, this project investigate how the concept of home is developing and culturally bound and how devices should enable and diversify social interaction in a new material or virtual settings of the elderly people. Instead of medicalization of the house or “patient-in-site”, I examine the evolving new materials and spaces of ageing during this ongoing transformation in three dimensions: First, dissolutions of family clans, second higher social mobility and third digitalization/virtualization. These three trends change boundaries and create new spaces of what is perceived as “home” for the elderly in his materialized representation. It is our aim is to analyze these social and technological reconfigurations for better health of the elderly during field studies, interviews of ageing communities.