Caring Over Computing: An Ethical and Sociotechnical Perspective on Generative AI for Social Connectedness in Dementia Care

Teis Arets, Giulia Perugia, Maarten Houben, Wijnand IJsselsteijn

People with dementia in residential care often experience reduced social connectedness. Person-centered care approaches foreground meaningful social interactions to support well-being, but staff and time pressures increasingly constrain opportunities for such care. Generative AI (GenAI) technologies offer possibilities for helping care professionals facilitate social connectedness, despite increasing care pressures. Yet, the meaningful integration of such technologies into the complex sociotechnical setting of residential dementia care is not straightforward. To responsibly design GenAI technologies for dementia care, we need to investigate how care professionals recognize and foster social connectedness and how technologies intersect with those approaches in care contexts. We conducted five workshops with 15 care professionals from three care organizations to pursue this objective. Our findings show that fostering social connectedness involves ongoing interpretation, negotiation, and adaptation to residents' individual needs. Technology was used by care professionals to support communication, interaction, and shared activities, yet remained largely peripheral to everyday care routines and required active mediation for use in practice. Drawing on an ethics of care framework, we derive ethical and sociotechnical implications for the responsible design and positioning of GenAI in residential dementia care.