Health ministry reports AI care roadmap

The health ministry said Tuesday it reported a roadmap to the Cabinet that would fold artificial intelligence into home care, care facilities and welfare administration.

The plan aims to build what the ministry calls a smart home that watches over people who live alone around the clock, replacing a system that confirmed a crisis only after as long as six hours without movement. Under the new model, AI combines daily living patterns, health data and conversations to detect unusual signs early and connect the user to the service they need.

In care facilities, night staff now walk the floors every two hours to check safety, sleep and continence. The roadmap would move that monitoring to smart diapers and fall and motion sensors, cutting repetitive work so staff can spend their time on face-to-face care. The ministry plans to develop and demonstrate the models in 400 households and 12 facilities in 2027, then spread them from 2028, starting with public care.

The roadmap covers a second track as well: welfare administration itself. Generative AI would offer welfare consultations in ordinary speech from 2027, with one-click application by 2029, and automatic payment would be pursued first for universal benefits such as the child allowance. More than half of standardized welfare administration work, including document intake, verification and data entry, would be automated by 2028, freeing welfare officials for counseling and case management.

A detection model would be used to find households in economic crisis in 2027 and to identify complex crises such as isolation, abuse and care needs in 2029. The ministry also plans to link welfare and care data held by public and private bodies from 2027 and to introduce welfare and care MyData in the same year. Officials said that system would later be linked to medical MyData.

Technology development runs alongside the service plans. The health ministry and the science ministry will jointly pursue AI and internet-of-things care technologies from 2027, widening the research to physical AI and robotics from 2028, with home and facility demonstration sites used to feed field data back into development. Technologies proven effective would be spread through long-term care insurance benefits, facility fees and vouchers.

The ministry also plans legal grounds and ethics guidelines for AI use, training for care workers, welfare officials and older people, and a governance body with government, experts, companies and the field.

"With a care workforce shortage expected, the new role of technologies such as AI is becoming more important," Health Minister Jeong Eun-kyung said. "But AI is not a replacement for people; it is a helper that shares simple and repetitive tasks. We will use AI to raise the sustainability of care and the value of care work."

The Korea Social Security Information Service would handle data and AI safety management, the Central Social Service Institute would handle field application, the Korea Health Industry Development Institute would support research and commercialization, and the Korea Human Resource Development Institute for Health and Welfare would handle training.