Wearables, fitness apps and home-based monitoring technology designed to help manage chronic diseases are generally considered in terms of their effectiveness in saving costs and improving the health care system. This article looks, instead, at the digital health practices of persons older than 65 years; it considers their actual health practices, their senses and emotions. In a qualitative study 27 elderly persons were interviewed about their digital health practices and accompanied while using the devices. The findings show that digital technologies and ageing bodies are co-productive in performing specific modes of health and the ageing process. The study shows that digital technologies not only encourage the elderly to remain physically active and enable them to age in place, but also that the use of these technologies causes the elderly to develop negative emotions that stand in a charged relationship to ageing stereotypes. Thereby, the sense of seeing has been place in pole position, while the faculty for introspection declines. This means that age-related impaired vision can result in particularly severe consequences. In the discussion it is debated in which concrete ways that digital health technologies have had a negative impact. The sociotechnical practices associated with wearables conform to the primacy of preventing ageing; passive and active monitoring technologies appear as subsystems of risk estimation, which in turn regulates diverse practices. The conclusion highlights the interrelation between notions of successful ageing and the digital practices of the elderly.

In the last decade, the focus of studies on age and aging has fundamentally changed from biological to symbolic, discursive, and cultural phenomena. Currently, the most studied topic in material gerontology is the materiality of age and aging in the context of everyday life. Scholars in this area have thus been making an important contribution to a material understanding of aging processes. As we understand them, however, both social constructivist and material gerontological concepts reach their limit when it comes to the questions of where and how aging processes actually take place in everyday life. In order to answer these two questions, we review social constructivist ideas with a particular focus on the "doing age" concept and material gerontological assumptions regarding human subjects, their material environments, and their relations. We then suggest rethinking bodily limitations and agencies addressed by scholars in the field of new materialism. The aim is to develop a new materialist-inspired understanding of aging processes that helps to reconstruct the material-discursive co-production of aging processes. These processes are deployed as mutual entanglements of materiality and meaning as well as of humans and non-human agency. This approach emphasizes the decentralization of the human actor and thus helps to map the material-discursive complexity of aging processes as relational co-products of humans and non-humans in everyday life.

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