Wellcome Trust Seed Award - AI and Health: Exploring Affect and Relationality Across Three Sites of Intelligence and Care

The overall aim of this project was to develop novel approaches across a multidisciplinary network of collaborators to explore affect and relationality in the design and applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in health. We focused on three dimensions of intelligence - physical, interpretive and emotional - and three related applications of AI in health and social care - robotics and surgery, digital pathology, and robotics in social care. The project had two main components: (1) A conceptual development (published in 'Social Science & Medicine') which scrutinises how AI and robotic technologies are transforming the relationships between people and machines in new affective, embodied and relational ways through investigating what it means to exist as human ‘in relation’ to AI across health and care contexts; (2) An empirical study (currently under review at 'AI & Society') based on 30 qualitative interviews carried out by De Togni in 2020 with a range of stakeholders, AI developers and healthcare practitioners based in the UK, Europe, USA, Australia, and New Zealand. These explored how those engaged in developing and using AI and robotics applications in health and social care characterise the future promise, potential and challenges of using these technologies.