Abstract

Purpose: Rapid population aging has intensified structural pressures on caregiving systems, resulting in workforce shortages, high turnover, and persistent caregiver burnout. Although welfare technologies such as care robots, wearable devices, and digital care platforms are widely promoted as solutions, many fail to achieve sustained adoption or industrialization. This study aims to explain why welfare technologies repeatedly remain confined to pilot implementation despite technical viability. Drawing on consumer behavior theory, service-dominant logic, emotional labor theory, and well-being economics, this paper reframes caregivers as consumers and primary value evaluators of welfare technology. It argues that caregivers’ emotional and eudaimonic value expectations are often implicit in everyday care practices and therefore remain unarticulated within prevailing technology design, procurement, and evaluation frameworks. When these implicit needs are excluded, welfare technologies may deliver functional improvements while generating compliance without long-term engagement. The study proposes a caregiver-centered conceptual framework that links needs articulation, perceived value in use, and welfare technology industrialization. Illustrative cases are employed to contextualize the framework and to demonstrate the persistence of unmet emotional and eudaimonic needs across different care settings and stages of technology exposure. The analysis highlights how mis-specifying caregivers as passive intermediaries rather than consumers leads to recurring adoption failure. Conclusions: The findings suggest that recognizing caregivers as consumers and systematically integrating their value perceptions into design and policy processes is a necessary condition for sustainable welfare technology markets beyond function-oriented innovation.