SmartUp Fact Sheet: Dealing with the Digital Care Gap

Smart home technologies are often seen as tools to ease domestic work—but they neither reduce traditional care responsibilities nor eliminate household chores. Instead, they generate new forms of invisible labor, known as digital housekeeping—including device setup, maintenance, troubleshooting, and data management. Far from being neutral, these technologies can reinforce existing gender inequalities, deepen dependencies, and introduce new forms of control and surveillance in the home. To ensure that digitalization supports equality rather than undermines it, technological innovation must be paired with strong social and policy measures. Policymakers should require companies to implement transparency features, shared access, and user-friendly control settings to minimize the risks of surveillance, misuse, and internal power asymmetries in domestic spaces. This Fact Sheet is part of the SMARTUP Project: Smart(ening up the modern) home – Redesigning power dynamics through domestic space digitalisation. The German, Czech, and Polish consortiums for this CHANSE project are funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research [grant number: 01UX2209], the Czech Academy of Sciences [grant number: 796], and the National Science Centre in Poland [grant number: 2021/03/Y/HS6/00250], respectively.