What's "Calls of Care"?
Calls of Care is a design prototype exploring possible roles of robotic technology in elderly care.
An old-fashioned push-button telephone, mounted on a robot, navigates a care facility; when it rings, residents can answer and engage in personalised, AI-generated conversations that draw on their biographical data.
Who is it for?
The project is aimed at care home residents living with dementia, whose changing abilities can unsettle their sense of self and call for supportive care structures. The work is also relevant for care workers and organisations exploring how technology might support human care relationships. In addition, it addresses researchers and policymakers concerned with the ethical dimensions of AI and robotics in care, particularly questions of human dignity and self-determination.
Approach
The project employed participatory design, bringing together expertise from care sciences, design research, technology, and labour sciences. Starting from the question “what makes good care?”, the team conducted workshops with care recipients, caregivers, relatives, and institutional stakeholders in Vienna.
Guided by a more-than-human understanding of matters of care, a speculative design phase produced concepts and design directions that informed the design of the functional prototype. The AI agent that answers the telephone generates validating conversations, which is a therapeutic approach that has been widely shown to be useful in dementia care.
Contribution
The project demonstrates how speculative prototyping can provoke productive debate about robotic technology in human care. It underlines the value of participatory design. It argues that careful design decisions can allow AI to have agency in a care scenario and that this approach can have therapeutic benefit.
The work helps explore what technology should do rather than what it merely could do.
Why is it in the Observatory?
At a time when aging populations intensify interest in technological fixes for challenges in delivering care, this work shows how Design Research can generate more nuanced challenges and questions. This is important so we can make careful choices about how to implement modern technology, based on around the human factors that will improve care outcomes.
This project shows how Design Research can help us get the most out of technology and ensure it helps people.