Al-driven platform care: Promoting equal and inclusive job quality in long-term care (CareQuAI)

CareQuAI will open “the black box” of AI-driven platform care services, through cross-national comparison, organisational case studies, stakeholder involvement and the participation of care workers in the development of equal and inclusive platform care digital-technologies. AI-driven platform care are identified as online services that use ‘algorithmic management’ to predict workflow needs, match supply (workers’ availability and capacity) and demand (people seeking care), and automated administrative functions. This project explores the technological affordances, opportunities and social consequences of platform care in three European countries: the UK, Sweden and Finland. As in Europe, the long term care (LTC) for older people delivered in these countries is considered to be ‘in crisis’ (United Nations, 2018). Demographic changes, a shortage of institutional and community services, high costs and poor quality of care have reinforced the challenge of providing affordable LTC, and the covid-19 pandemic has further deteriorated the working conditions and exacerbated labour force shortages. Imperatively, job quality and levels of staff turnover are also shown to be interrelated with quality of care (Allan & Vadean, 2023; Burns et al 2016) and an important focus for change recognised by labour trade unions and policy-building organisations.
In this crisis context the size of the EU platform economy in the domestic and home services sector has increased from EUR 0.8 to 1.5 billion between 2016-2020 (European Care Strategy, 2022). AI-driven platforms are increasingly employed by care companies, care workers, and service users and their family members, and are presented as offering solutions to the interlinked challenges of workforce shortages and job quality. Platform work has been presented as offering higher wages than conventional employment (De Groen et al. 2018) through optimised scheduling and decreased manual administration. Yet platform work also challenges...