Ecology of Care Congress 2016 – applied Care through robotics

Twelve influential industrial and academic speakers from twelve completely different fields will come together in Copenhagen from 17th-18th November to consider and discuss their ideas on the vitally important concept of Care.

At this Ecology of Care Congress 2016, which is co-organised by our Danish core consortium partner Blue Ocean Robotics, Prof. Anders Steengaard Sørensen from the University of Southern Denmark will give a talk on applied Care through robotics. As Prof. Sørensen outlines in his abstract, a primary objective of welfare technology is “to improve, obtain or retain self-reliance, essentially reducing the need for humans to perform the physical tasks of obligatory care. This can reduce the cost of professional care and the strain on affectionate carers. Most importantly, it can remove the negative emotions of relying on obligatory care from others.”

This statement is very close to the mission of the solutions developed in ECHORD++’s Public end-user Driven Technological Innovation (PDTI) scheme. Giving human caregivers more time for interaction with patients is one of the main goals of the robots being developed to perform a Comprehensive Geriatric Assessment (CGA).

But, the Ecology of Care congress is about much more than health care, aged-care, the health industry, etc. It is about reviving an original notion of Care that describes the fundamental essence of human Being in all aspects of life – engineering, design, business, climate change and the environment, etc. – something we will need to artfully employ if we are to continue to succeed as a species in the years ahead. It is a concept that is increasingly cited as fundamental to our thinking and we should be clear about what it means for our efforts to survive as well as how we might begin to use it across a very broad spectrum of practice. Registration for the congress is still open but places are limited.

More information about the Congress can be found here.

Further reading and registration is available here, to register directly click here.