New development: Digital social care—the ‘high-tech and low-touch’ transformation in public services

IMPACT

This article introduces new technological developments transforming social care and enabling better care for vulnerable populations. While acknowledging traditional technologies already used in digital social care, the authors move beyond these passive technologies and show the benefits of the next-generation and the generation-after-next assistive technologies in supporting older people and people with disabilities. The reliance of social care on technology comes with challenges, such as cost, technology illiteracy and social workers’ skills. The authors propose further empirical studies to address these challenges, and urge policy-makers, scholars and practitioners to collaborate and develop policy and regulations for new digital social services.

ABSTRACT

Social care is one of the fundamental services provided by governments worldwide. Nevertheless, austerities, workforce crises and an ageing population are challenging social care provision. One of the ways to improve this situation is to adopt technology-infused services. To date, the digitalization of social care has been mainly focused on organizational benefits from passive technologies, with scant attention to the end-users needs. The authors discuss several opportunities and challenges to move towards active and autonomous digitalization to support public social care. Drawing upon the public service ecosystem, the authors develop a research agenda to advance policy and practice in social services.

KEYWORDS:

• Assistive technologies
• digital social care
• ‘high-tech and low-touch’ service delivery
• policy
• public services
• social care
• vulnerable population

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).