Health and Care

How can patients, citizens and healthcare professionals meaningfully shape the AI systems increasingly becoming part of health and care? AI is rapidly transforming healthcare through clinical decision support, digital services, personalised medicine and AI-enabled patient applications. Yet many of these technologies are designed for people rather than with them.

This challenge explores how citizen-centred approaches can help ensure that future health AI is trusted, inclusive, equitable and shaped by those who use it.

Indicative potential partners

• Health Innovation North East and North Cumbria
• NHS Business Services Authority
• NHS Digital
• NHS North East and North Cumbria

Illustrative research directions

• Participatory design of AI-enabled NHS services
• Patient agency and control over health AI
• AI for self-management and long-term conditions
• Trust, explainability and transparency in healthcare AI
• Accessibility and health inequalities
• AI governance in health and care
• Citizen involvement in evaluating health AI
• Robots that support ageing-in-place

Indicative reading

• The NHS App should focus on inequalities to improve population health

  A.A. Laverty, C. Reidy, K.C. Sukriti, C. Papoutsi, B. Gudgin, A. Majeed, J. Powell

  2026. Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine, 119(2), pp.37-41. doi:10.1177/01410768261421427

• Artificial intelligence in healthcare: past, present and future

  F. Jiang, Y. Jiang, H. Zhi, Y. Dong, H. Li, S. Ma, ..., Y. Wang

  2017. Stroke and vascular neurology, 2(4), 230-243. doi:10.1136/svn-2017-000101

• From efficiency to meaning: Adolescents’ envisioned role of AI in health management

  J. Lee, K. Jung, C. Lee, L. MacDonnell, J. Kim, D. Otterson, ..., Y. Chen

  Apr 2026. In Proceedings of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1-18). doi:10.1145/3772318.3790498

• Robots in aged care: a dystopian future?

  R. Sparrow

  2016. AI & society, 31(4), pp.445-454. doi:10.1007/s00146-015-0625-4

• Redefining Elderly Care With Agentic AI: Challenges and Opportunities

  R. A. Khalil, K. Ahmad, H. Ali

  2026. IEEE Open Journal of the Computer Society, vol. 7, pp. 326-342. doi:10.1109/ojcs.2026.3650842

If you are applying to join the CCAI programme, and have difficulty accessing any of the papers above, please contact us.