The Smart Floor: How a Public-Private Partnership co-developed a heterogeneous healthcare technology system

Currently, a wide variety of healthcare technologies are being implemented in private homes, hospitals, nursing homes, etc. with the triple aim of improving people's health, improving the quality of care, and reducing costs related to healthcare services. In this chapter, we discuss how different actors in a public-private partnership co-developed a heterogeneous system around the Smart Floor to ensure that both new healthcare practices and residents' routines were inscribed into the new healthcare technology. We argue that implementing the Smart Floor was not just a question of buying a technology and integrating it during construction-it required co-development with the healthcare staff. The floor is more than a technology placed under the floor surface in a resident's apartment; rather, it is a heterogeneous network of human and non-human actors communicating with each other. In this chapter, we illustrate how the heterogeneous technological system was co-developed and redesigned during knowledge sharing processes with companies, lead-users, and healthcare staff. We also discuss how care practices have changed as a result of the Smart Floor system. In particular, healthcare staff members no longer feel a need to disturb elderly residents with routine in-person checks. Domesticating the technologies for different groups of actors required not only coordinating communication among sensors, the interface, the portable nurse call (smartphones), and alarms, but also accepting the use of surveillance technology.