‘I Put a Lot of Emotion in My Work, I Use It, It's My Tool’: An Ethnographic Account of Algorithmic Homecare Assistance in the Netherlands

This paper explores how the introduction of AI-powered remote technologies reconfigures emotional practices in homecare. Drawing on three months of ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with a Dutch company that replaces in-house nurses with remote monitoring systems and nonmedically trained ‘coaches’, the authors analyse the introduction of so-called ‘empathy sessions’: 15-minute per week (online) calls aimed at making up for the emotional void left by reduced or removed in-person nursing. These sessions transform this nursing intervention into a new, technically mediated format that creates new professional roles, alters the training of both nurses and coaches and reshapes how homecare clients engage with care providers. We argue that the company's emphasis on efficiency as a guiding value plays a central role in shaping how these emotional practices are understood and enacted: empathy is condensed into time-limited sessions, reassigned from nurses to newly created roles (coaches) and moved to technologically mediated exchanges. Beyond this reshaping, the study also shows the ambiguities involved and raises questions about how care is allocated, who gets to perform it and how its delivery is shaped by entrepreneurial frameworks of efficiency and market-oriented healthcare delivery.