AI is viewed as a promising and inevitable development in home care, with the potential to tackle challenges linked to societal aging, such as diverse care needs, workforce shortages, and inefficiencies in welfare systems. However, its implementation raises ethical concerns about how AI may produce or exacerbate vulnerability through exclusion, marginalization, labor exploitation, and emerging risks for older adults and care workers.
This project examines how vulnerability is constructed, negotiated, and practiced in using and implementing AI-automated home care in Estonia, Finland, Norway, and Sweden. It focuses on four empirical dimensions: (1) how AI, aging, and care are represented in regulatory frameworks; (2) how innovation leaders frame user needs, opportunities, risks, and worst-case scenarios; (3) how older adults perceive and experience AI in home care; and (4) how care workers respond to AI integration in the workplace. We propose “vulnerability intersections” as a conceptual approach to examine how vulnerability emerges at the intersection of biographical histories, social identities, and shifting structural conditions.
The project draws on political economy, life course theory, intersectionality, and the sociology of translation to enable a multi-level understanding of vulnerability as socially and institutionally produced. Empirically, the study examines policy texts, expert interviews with innovation leaders, and life course narratives of older adults and care workers, using qualitative methods. A critical and comparative perspective informs analysis, ensuring sensitivity to cross-country variations in sociocultural contexts.
The project will generate new knowledge on how AI-driven automation shapes care experiences, labor, inequality, and welfare systems, while informing policy and practice by identifying structural disadvantages and highlighting promising and problematic responses to vulnerability. To maximize societal impact, we will implement a targeted communication, dissemination, and stakeholder engagement strategy to involve policymakers, practitioners, and the public in support of strengthening social resilience of older adults and care workers and fostering ethical and responsible use of AI. An interdisciplinary team of early-stage, junior, and senior researchers will conduct the research, supported by capacity building and academic exchange activities.
