To move treatment successfully from the hospital to that of technology assisted self-care at home, it is vital in the design of such technologies to understand the setting in which the health IT should be used. Based on qualitative studies we find that people engage in elaborate boundary work to maintain the order of the home when managing disease and adopting new healthcare technology. In our analysis we relate this boundary work to two continuums of visibility-invisibility and integration-segmentation in disease management. We explore five factors that affect the boundary work: objects, activities, places, character of disease, and collaboration. Furthermore, the processes are explored of how boundary objects move between social worlds pushing and shaping boundaries. From this we discuss design implications for future healthcare technologies for the home.

Today the design of most healthcare technology is driven by the considerations of healthcare professionals and technology companies. This has several benefits, but we argue that there is a need for a supplementary design approach on the basis the citizen and his or her everyday life. An approach where the main focus is to develop healthcare technology that fits the routines of daily life and thus allows the citizens to continue with the activities they like and have grown used to -- also with an aging body or when managing a chronic condition. Thus, with this approach it is not just a matter of fixing a health condition, more importantly is the matter of sustaining everyday life as a whole. This argument is a result from our work -- using participatory design methods -- on the development of supportive healthcare technology for elderly people and for diabetic, pregnant women.

We report on the results of an ethnographic study of how elders manage their medication with the objective of informing the de-sign of in-home assistive health technology to support "medication adherence." We describe the methods by which elders organize and remember to take their medication-methods that leverage a kind of distributed cognition. Elders devise medication manage-ment systems that rely on the spatial features of their homes, the temporal rhythms of their days, as well as the routines that occa-sion these places and times to help recall and prospective remem-bering. We show how mobile health care workers participate in the development and execution of these systems, and "read" them to infer an elder's state of health and ability to manage medication. From this analysis, we present five principles for the design of assistive technology that support the enhanced but on-going use of personalized medication management systems, and that also allow for remote health care assistance as it becomes needed.