CAREER: DURAIS : A Platform for Co-Designing and Understanding the Roles of Conversational Artificial Intelligence Systems on Caregiving

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This award is funded in part under the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 (Public Law 117-2). Caregiving involves socially, emotionally, and physically demanding work. However, resources for caregivers are limited. This research project aims to advance the state-of-the-art of human-centered artificial intelligence (AI). This project investigate the roles conversational AI systems (CAI) can play in supporting caregivers (e.g., parents, guardians, other family members) and how domain experts and caregivers can work together to define these roles. By studying two different contexts of caregiving--parenting and living with dementia--the research contributes to; (1) understanding the roles and limitations on when conversational AI addresses caregiving needs; and, (2) developing a platform for stakeholders to co-design conversational AI that supports the work of caregiving. Conversational AI is expected to help caregivers to focus on the work that cannot be automated, reducing caregiving demands and improving quality. Engaging with community throughout the research program is expected to generate beneficial outcomes. Processes of engagement include community-facing workshops and seminars, disseminating knowledge, and generating synergistic collaborative opportunities with cross-disciplinary fields, such as nursing, nutrition, and family health, solving society’s big problems through AI technologies. The research project contributes to identifying the social and technical boundaries of how AI systems can support the work involved in caregiving (e.g., parenting, caregiving ill individuals) by defining these roles through co-design with domain experts and caregivers. The project begins by performing formative interviews and analysis of conversational data sources of caregiver support activities to conduct requirements engineering on which caregiving work can be supported, reduced, or automated through CAI. Implementing these requirements with generative and rule-based CAI then tests comparative performances of various language models in effectively generating automated CAI responses. Building on this formative work, the project develops the DURAIS platform, allowing domain experts and caregivers to co-design CAI supporting caregiving. By developing and evaluating a co-design platform of CAI in two different contexts of caregiving—parenting and living with dementia--the research contributes to testing how CAI co-design can resolve challenges around inefficiencies of rule-based systems and unreliability of generative models and evaluating how automatically generated conversations of generative- vs. rule-based CAI can uniquely support caregiving. The research program broadly contributes to understanding novel paradigms for co-designing AI systems that support socially and culturally complex and demanding work.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.