Arctic RoboWelfare -Development environment for Lapland's well-being robotics

The aim of the project is to strengthen the data-based utilization of robotics in the digital transformation of the Lapland region in renewing the operating models of welfare services. The main themes are equality, accessibility and ethics, customer orientation, participation and human agency. The situation of the social and health care sector and the rapid development of technology have highlighted the need to find robotics and AI based solutions for supporting the social and health sector and for evaluating the customer and personnel level impacts. As known, the support for implementation and utilization is still insufficient and there are lack of opportunities to try out the possibilities of robotics together with multidisciplinary experts in the province of Lapland. Awareness of the possibilities of use and implementation of robotics also needs an even stronger review.

Various development and testing environments enable cooperation between customers and professionals of companies and social security services to promote deployments and in trials before final purchases. So far, there is no special development environment in the use of welfare services in the province of Lapland that would enable experiments. The Lapland University of Applied Sciences (AMK) and the University of Lapland have several development environments in the welfare sector and the researcher and expert resources, whose overall potential has not yet been utilized.

The project is divided into four work packages: Modeling the robotics development environments in the welfare sector (WP1), Starting and strengthening the networking of Arctic RoboWelfare experts (WP2), Activating the area and identifying needs to support implementations (WP3) and Testing the implementation of robotics in the development environments (WP4).

The project will provide the province of Lapland with a new common robotics development environment for welfare sector, a change laboratory and a new expert network. In addition, the project produces a new kind of innovation ecosystem, which strengthens the utilization and sharing of the results and good practices of operators' R&D activities, as well as the possibilities of joint development and rapid experimentation of different operators in the application area of robotics. Experiments support the capabilities of experts and researchers to utilize robotics, e.g. by increasing information on how robotics is implemented by social and health professionals.