Infrastructuring ethical use of surveillance technology in dementia care.

While surveillance technology, such as GPS and motion sensors, is increasingly used in dementia care to heighten safety, it also poses new risks and ethical concerns. This paper explores the development of ethical practices around technology and presents a case study of infrastructuring the ethical use of surveillance technology in dementia care. Our ethnographic fieldwork at a Danish nursing home identified surveillance practices based on continuous tinkering and distributed negotiations to manage risks. However, new legislation and subsequent increased use of surveillance technology challenged care workers’ tinkering, resulting in both false, redundant, and failing alarms. The misleading alarms potentially jeopardise the safety of residents and result in a breakdown of the ethical commitment of care workers to care for residents. Drawing on the notion of infrastructuring, we demonstrate how new ethical surveillance practices were developed through a codesign process. The codesign process creates an organisational framework and space for reflection, which supports care workers in creative tinkering and safe implementation of large-scale strategies in a local context. Through our case, we argue for the need to more broadly address the infrastructuring of ethics and suggest that codesign lends itself as a promising approach to this endeavour.