Caring over computing: an ethical and sociotechnical perspective on digital technologies for social connectedness in...

People with dementia in residential care often experience reduced social connectedness. Person-centered care approaches foreground meaningful social interactions to support well-being, but staff and time pressures increasingly constrain opportunities for such care. Digital technologies offer possibilities to help care professionals facilitate social connectedness, despite increasing care pressures. Yet, the meaningful integration of such technologies into the complex sociotechnical setting of residential dementia care is not straightforward. To responsibly design and position digital technologies for dementia care, this study empirically explores care professionals' perspectives on social connectedness and the sociotechnical role of conventional digital technologies in residential dementia care. We conducted five workshops with 15 care professionals from three care organizations to pursue this objective. Our findings show that fostering social connectedness is a relational process involving continuous interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation to residents' individual needs, personal values, and institutional constraints. Digital technologies were used by care professionals to support communication, interaction, and shared activities, yet remained largely peripheral to everyday care routines and were primarily used reactively in response to observed behavior. Drawing on an ethics of care framework, we derive ethical and sociotechnical implications for the responsible design and positioning of digital technologies in residential dementia care.