Clara Berridge, UW School of Social Work assistant professor, studies technologies that “differ dramatically in purpose and place of use." Her research—featured in a recent Whole U faculty profile—explores the social and ethical aspects of how healthcare technologies challenge, change and enhance care relationships, especially for older adults.
Most of Berridge's work focuses on remote monitoring technologies such as GPS that track one’s location and in-home sensors intended to ease caregiving by tracking things like deviations from typical bathroom use, wake up time, and other activities in the home. She also examines the phenomenon of families installing cameras in older adults’ rooms in care facilities as a means to identify and deter elder abuse. Berridge is the first to have conducted a survey of cameras in nursing home and assisted living resident rooms aimed at monitoring staff.
“There are a lot of issues related to aging in a society where we don’t give people enough time to do family caregiving,” Berridge says. “We’re inevitably moving toward more technology use in care for people with disabilities and older adults.”
Increasingly, technology has aimed to fill, if not close, the care-giving gap in the form of a bevy of cameras, robots, and other monitoring equipment—even pills with sensors that can track when they are metabolized.
“The theory is that if we can track people’s behaviors and movements, then we can prevent problems and help people live at home longer,” Berridge says. She says she sees the motive as a noble one, but cautions that the introduction of new forms of monitoring and surveillance into care relationships raises ethical dilemmas and essential questions about how humans view and care for one another.