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This article explores how technology, care and old age combine, in a time when society's belief in technology and innovation dominates. Critical perspectives on technology in care often outline the future of old age as instrumentally controlled and surveilled with care workers so distant that their faces remain in the shadows. This article analyzes care at «ground level» in municipal homecare services where care is done with welfare technology – and the fragile old body needs to fit in. The safety alarm plays an especially important role in the shaping of the interactions between care workers and service users in order to achieve care. This technocare-practice requires that the care workers learn to interpret and sort user needs as reported through the mobile phone. Incoming alarms often demand that they prioritize between users, while also creating pretexts for care. Care and technology are not contradictions or «representatives of different worlds», but interconnections that make good or bad care experiences. Therefore, the practical value of welfare technology cannot be defined in advance. When that still happens, this reflects the policy of welfare technology as an institutionalizing process with currently larger effects in the care sector than the individual technical systems.

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