Does technology ever facilitate relationally satisfying encounters? Can it offer holding or containment in everyday settings to people who are anxious, fearful or vulnerable? Can immersive media assist with loneliness, depression, isolation and immobility? Can robots accomplish physical care and offer reassurance and containment in the process? Can AI ‘companions’ be ‘trained’ to complement psychotherapy? Do such technologies substitute, enhance, complement or threaten human care?

These are urgent questions in the context of the ageing and sickening populations of so-called ‘developed’ societies. Economic and policy-driven interest in this field is often motivated by concern over the ‘burden’ of ageing and the expense of mental health provision intensified by labour shortages in health and social care, where taxpayers are supposedly unwilling to foot the bill, whereas ‘caring machines’ bring cost savings and commercial opportunities. These are powerful drivers to try to find solutions to the crisis and complexity of care. Reactions to new technologies are often polarised leading to manic idealisation or denigrating rejection.

There is a significant amount of work happening at the interface between research on health and Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Artificial Intelligence (AI). This experiential and interactive session will consider whether and how Caretech might enable presence as an indispensable aspect of care, viewed from a psychosocial perspective. It will introduce technological developments made by colleagues in the fEEL Lab in Sydney. Participants will be offered the opportunity to engage with a sample of VR, AR, MR, and AI technologies and experience their potentials and limitations first hand. The session will invite participants to consider how these experiential technologies might be used in therapeutic, educational and practice settings.