Rt Hon Paul Burstow, Professor Neil Maiden, Dr Dympna O’Sullivan, Dr Simone Stumpf, Members of the SCAMPI Research Consortium, City, University of London

The EPSRC-funded Self-Care Advice, Monitoring, Planning and Intervention (SCAMPI) Consortium is researching new artificial intelligence technologies to support people with chronic diseases to improve the quality of their lives at home. Until 2020, it will develop and evaluate automated planning, reasoning and sensing technologies to support people with two conditions – dementia and Parkinson’s disease – to enable them to plan and monitor their lives and care at home. These technologies will then be evolved and rolled out to support people with other chronic health conditions. It is hoped that SCAMPI will have significant future impact on people with chronic diseases and their families by using artificial intelligence in everyday health management decisions, and on third-sector organisations seeking to leverage these new technologies to solve critical health and social care challenges.

SCAMPI’s new uses of artificial intelligence to support social care are important. The project is one of the few in the UK to deploy artificial intelligence in social care to empower people with new knowledge and capabilities, rather than to automate and replace these people. To respond to the Select Committee, SCAMPI draws on its knowledge and expertise from the perspectives of social care and related healthcare research. Key SCAMPI recommendations are:

1. Enable and educate the general public to take ownership of their personal health and social care data, as part of their active care and life planning;
2. Ensure that health and social care professionals are equipped to understand, procure and deploy artificial intelligence and machine learning through suitable informatics education and training;
3. To reduce the potential for incorrect decisions, increase the transparency of artificial intelligence algorithms to enable public scrutiny and oversight and intervention by health and care professionals;
4. Determine the mix of regulatory and procurement action necessary to ensure that black-box artificial intelligence does not deny people access to information generated from their own datasets – a risk to the ethical ownership of people’s data;
5. Work with social care commissioners and providers to create opportunities for UK- based artificial intelligence research enterprises to support the sector realise the potential of these technologies; and
6. Regulators need to future proof the way they regulate. The changing landscape needs to be mapped against the scope Parliament has determined for each relevant regulator.

The full report can be found here: Response to Lords Select Committee