Health: Caring through ComAI

ComAI is increasingly presented as a solution to the care needs of an ageing population, particularly in the face of reduced funding for healthcare systems and a shortage of healthcare professionals. These technologies are also promoted as tools for healthy ageing, a policy objective aimed at enhancing the wellbeing of older adults. Within this framework, technology companies and policymakers create regimes of anticipation that ascribe various care obligations to ComAI including managing healthy aging, providing health information, and facilitating older adults access to healthcare services. The project investigates how different groups of older adults (can) appropriate communicative AI. This is done using digital methods and conducting qualitative case studies in Austria, Germany, the UK and the USA. Four research questions guide the project: (1) What regimes of anticipations by powerful actors such as technology companies, policy makers and healthcare managers about the care obligations of ComAI have emerged in the context of healthy ageing? (2) What types of hybrid healthcare figurations emerge in response to the aforementioned regimes of anticipation? (3) What (self-)care practices of older adults, their informal carers and healthcare workers emerge through, for and in opposition to ComAI? (4) How can we theorize the appropriation of ComAI for healthy ageing with a focus on the challenge of care?