CAIR4ME: Digital transformation in care
Caregiving relatives, especially new caregiving parents, face the challenge of insufficient information about procedures, processes, rights and coordination of home care. Existing care advice services are not sufficiently tailored to specific needs. AI-supported chatbots are theoretically capable of assisting with information gathering in these areas.
In practice, however, they often prove problematic:
- They often provide unreliable or inappropriate answers.
- Expert knowledge must be regularly updated and maintained.
- They require a lot of technical knowledge from the family carers.
- They do not offer any opportunity to share experiential knowledge.
Human-centred and participatory knowledge hub
The CAIR4ME project aims to support family carers with an interactive, AI-supported knowledge base that provides reliable information tailored to specific situations. The aim is to create a human-centred and participatory knowledge hub. This hub uses both expert knowledge and experiential knowledge and makes it available to close knowledge gaps, reduce complexity and meet information needs in home care situations more efficiently. The aim is to develop new interaction concepts for knowledge building and retrieval that are compatible with the mental models and real-life situations of users and go beyond conventional chatbot functionalities. To this end, the project is developing an AI-based system that proactively takes into account the individual context of users. The desired solution would specifically offer
- Context-sensitive information
- Human-centred interaction design
- Practice-oriented application
At a Glance
| Category | Description |
|---|---|
| Research project | CAIR4ME: Digital transformation in care |
| Management | Dietlind Zühlke |
| Faculty | Fakultät für Informatik und Ingenieurwissenschaften |
| Institute | Institut für Data Science, Engineering, and Analytics (IDE+A) |
| Persons involved | Isabel Zorn (Digitale Technologien und Soziale Dienste / Fak. Angewandte Sozialwissenschaften), Raphaela Groten (Gestaltung interaktiver Systeme / Fak. Informatik & Ingenieurwissenschaften), Karin Tiesmeyer (Angewandte Pflegewissenschaft/ FB II Heilpädagogik und Pflege EvH) |
| Partners | PLiX Care Innovation GmbH, Diakonie Düsseldorf / Abteilung Heilpädagogische Hilfen, Neuland AI AG, hsag Heidelberger Services AG |
| Sponsors | Bundesministerium für Forschung, Technologie und Raumfahrt (BMFTR) |
| Duration | 01.04.2026 - 31.03.2030 |
Support for care practice
The project aims to support care practice by reducing uncertainty and increasing the efficiency of knowledge acquisition through a knowledge hub. This results in the following added value in practice:
- Caregiving relatives receive guidance and decision-making support in acute situations, which strengthens their self-efficacy and ability to act.
- Care experts benefit from standardised processes for integrating their knowledge without prior technical knowledge.
- With CAIR4ME, nursing professionals and counselling centres receive a tool that facilitates access to up-to-date, contextualised information and improves the quality of their counselling.
- For education and training in nursing and social work, the system can be used in training courses, skills labs and certificate courses.
The results and procedures from this project can be transferred to many other areas of application in a social and industrial context. In addition, three doctoral positions are planned and financed within the project.