Seed project: Ethics, Technology, and Democracy in Elderly Care (DEMCARE)
DEMCARE explores the ethical challenges and opportunities that digital tools create in elderly care, both today and in the near future, through a practically oriented workshop and pilot study that lay the groundwork for future collaborative research.
Project information
Project manager
Staffan Andersson
Other project members
Joel Martinsson, Tora Hammar
Participating organizations
Linnaeus University
Financier
Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Democracy in Question
Timetable
1 Jan 2026–31 Dec 2026
Subject
Health Informatics, Political Science (Department of Political Science, Faculty of Social Sciences)
More about the project
The core of DEMCARE (Ethics, Technology, and Democracy in Elderly Care) is to explore the ethical challenges and opportunities that digital tools create in elderly care, both today and in the near future.
New digital tools opens up significant opportunities: technology can improve care quality, enable more individually tailored care, and relieve staff in a sector under considerable resource pressure. Digital tools can also strengthen the participation and independence of older persons, and create better conditions for communication between users, staff, and relatives. On the other hand, these digital tools raises serious ethical questions: about privacy and surveillance, about who actually makes decisions when algorithms take over, and about the risk of reducing human relationships to administrative processes. There is also a real risk that new digital tools reinforces existing inequalities if not all users have equal capacity to benefit from the technology.
How these opportunities are seized and these challenges are met has a significant impact on the quality and equity of care. How users and relatives experience and understand these changes is central from a democratic perspective: those affected by care should have genuine influence over how technology is used and which values should guide it.
DEMCARE brings together researchers from political science, health sciences, and e-health at Linnaeus University to examine how ethical governance and new technologies can work together in the everyday practice of care. The project also develops pedagogical tools that will enable professionals and students to engage in informed discussion about these challenges and practice ethical decision-making in realistic care situations.
The aim of the seed project is to conduct a practically oriented workshop in autumn 2026, where researchers and practitioners jointly map ethical challenges in elderly care. During the workshop, a survey will be developed, intended to be sent to relevant stakeholders as a form of pilot study. Based on the survey results, the project then aims to design a transdisciplinary research project in which academics, citizens, and practitioners collaboratively explore how ethical and democratic values can be upheld in the elderly care of today and tomorrow. The project ultimately aims to lay the groundwork for future larger research initiatives in this area.
The project is part of the research in Linnaeus University Centre for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA) and Linnaeus Knowledge Environment: Democracy In Question.