Remote care or care at a distance for older people has been developing in discursive contexts that tap into the dual tropes of ageing as a social problem or burden resulting in a ‘care crisis’ (Matthews-King, 2018), and older people as intrinsically at risk (Pickard, 2009). Yet, older people are not necessarily sick, or not sick enough, for the ageing body to be brought into the clinic. The professionally adopted shift from chronological to functional definitions of ageing and the notion of the life course have come to underpin the character and organisation of care for older people, who are increasingly subject to ‘techniques of measurement, standardisation and intervention’ (Marshall and Katz, 2016: 146). With population ageing often framed as an economic burden, older people considered to be frail find themselves in a preclinical space, a kind of waiting room serviced by sensors and systems of monitoring. It is in this waiting room that we have observed forms of telecare playing a role, or attempting to facilitate ‘care’ rather than medicine.

Sensor-based home monitoring, or ‘telecare’ as it is often termed, differs, on the face of it, from the examples of biosensing that we have so far examined in this book. Within this field, there is, of course, a spectrum of domestic monitoring systems and devices that fall broadly into health-related and care-oriented modes. In the health/medical mode, ‘telehealth’ systems aim to improve ‘patient activation’ or self-care, providing users with readings of vital signs and facilitating the uploading or transmitting of data about their bodies for consideration by professionals. In contrast, the ‘care’ mode includes automated movement and home environment sensors that send signals to remote monitoring centres and usually trigger a phone call back to the ‘user’; these are most usually referred to as ‘telecare’ rather than ‘telehealth’. While many sensor-based devices collect data from the body for interpretation, in home telecare, there is less emphasis on the active self-tracking of health and more on the preservation of an existing state or ‘safety’, the maintenance of a kind of waiting, seen in many examples of monitoring systems generating automated messages about (it is claimed) bodily states.