The surveillance state is key for elderly individuals and to protect people from earthquakes and tsunamis.

Our project examined the role of smartphones mainly in relation to their consequences for older people and for health. We frequently came across instances where the demographic we focused upon, often people in their 50s to 70s, had elderly parents, in their 90s, who were now frail and needed considerable care. These circumstances provided clear demonstrations of the capacity of smartphones to develop care. In several fieldsites when someone is gravely ill, it seems that today, often the first response of family and friends is to create a WhatsApp group to organise their care. Another part of our project examined the use of smartphones in expressing care over distance for people living far from their parent or the patient. Projects examined the use of visual elements to express affection and consideration such as short health videos through WeChat in China or using stickers through LINE in Japan (Wang and Haapio-Kirk 2021), as a complement to the etiquettes and formality of face-to-face encounters. Another example came from research in a low- income settlement in Kampala, Uganda, that examined the use of mobile money in assisting older people who had remained in the villages and were now faced with health problems (Hawkins forthcoming). We summarised these findings as creating a condition of ‘Care Transcending Distance’ (Miller et al. 2021: 241–244). For example, the researcher in Brazil sometimes sim- ply didn’t know whether a grandmother was referring to the grandchild that lived in Sao Paulo or the one living in New York (Duque 2022). The way the grandmother talked about communicating with them by WhatsApp was just the same.¶ Precisely how people used WhatsApp groups to monitor and care for older people would vary. In Yaoundé, Cameroon Awondo reported how retired people are closely monitored by their children, a practice which may either involve having them live with the children, who can thereby keep a better eye on them (avoir un oeil sur eux), or instead, involve following them in very active family WhatsApp groups where one or two children often play a sentinel role. In all these examples, the obligations of kinship are given manifest form by a smartphone app. Such cases make it relatively easy for governments to claim that the development of contact tracing apps on smartphones is itself an expression of care. For example, Japan had already developed a system of phone messages to alert people to impending emergencies such as tsunamis and earthquakes (Haapio-Kirk forthcoming). All of this suggests that quite apart from contact tracing apps, there were many ways in which the smartphone had been adopted and adapted as an instrument of care