On February 19, the SHINE team, represented by Carina Dantas and Natália Machado, participated in the kick-off meeting of CARING-AI – Culturally Adaptive and Responsive AI-Driven Social Assistive Robots for Inclusive Care, a newly funded international project under the THCS Joint Transnational Call 2025.
Coordinated by McGill University and St. Mary’s Research Centre in Canada, the CARING-AI consortium brings together partners from Portugal, France, the Netherlands, Spain, Denmark, Austria and Italy. The project’s aim is to explore how social assistive robots can help strengthen primary and community care for migrant older adults, while keeping ethics, inclusion, and human values at the centre of technological innovation.
CARING-AI addresses a major societal challenge. As populations age across Europe and Canada, migrant older adults often face additional barriers in accessing care, including language obstacles, cultural differences, low health literacy and experiences of marginalisation. The project will investigate how culturally adaptive social robots can help address these challenges by supporting communication, engagement and more person-centred care pathways.
Over the next 30 months, the consortium will work through three main phases: a qualitative and co-design phase to identify needs, expectations and barriers; a proof-of-concept phase implemented in five countries across primary and community care settings; and a final phase focused on knowledge translation and policy labs involving end users, care professionals, policymakers, researchers and industry actors.
SHINE leads the communication and dissemination activities of the project.