AI and the Futures of Care: Health and Aging In Turbulent Times

As the global care workforce shrinks and the elderly population grows, AI is changing experiences of health and aging at individual, organizational, and societal levels, fundamentally reshaping healthcare. AI is also empowering older adults to extend their independence and autonomy, giving them tools for monitoring health through wearable devices, smart homes equipped with wireless systems to swiftly detect behavioral changes, ensure medication adherence, and provide fall detection, and augmenting capacities of caregiver and clinical workforce. In long-term care industry that faces severe staff and bed shortages, AI is taking on administrative burdens like charting, documentation, and first-pass summarizations, letting staff focus on human touch to medicine. However, AI adoption introduces significant risks, including but not limited to disparities in digital literacy especially among the oldest old, data privacy issues associated with collecting and sharing massive amounts of highly sensitive personal health information, and lack of robust ethical and regulatory infrastructures to ensure technology is safe and transparent. This session invites papers that explore the future possibilities AI may bring to health, healthcare, caregiving, and aging, to the benefit of patients, caregivers, healthcare staff, and societies at large, as well as limitations associated with AI, and ways to mitigate them. Empirical research using qualitative, quantitative, and/or mixed methods, systematic and scoping reviews of relevant literature, and conceptual pieces are all welcome. We look forward to showcasing studies co-produced by older adults, caregivers, AI developers, clinicians, and other lived experience stakeholders, alongside academic researchers, from around the world.