Welfare counseling is also smart. Finding families in crisis with artificial intelligence

Yeongdeungpo-gu (District Mayor Choi Ho-kwon) announced that it will promote a pilot project for early welfare counseling using artificial intelligence (AI) to quickly identify crisis-stricken households in the region.

Previously, public officials visited each household or conducted initial consultations over the phone to identify households in crisis, but this method had limitations in that it required a lot of time and manpower. To improve this, Yeongdeungpo-gu plans to introduce an artificial intelligence system to increase the efficiency of welfare consultations and accelerate the speed of identifying households in crisis.

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In this project, the conversational AI system sends a pre-warning text message to households suspected of being in crisis based on data registered in the ‘Happy e-um’ computer network, and then calls them using the common caller number (☎1600-2129) to conduct basic counseling. The counseling content is based on various scenarios such as the recipient’s health, economy, employment, and housing, and if a crisis situation is suspected, in-depth counseling continues through additional questions.

Based on the initial consultation, the responsible civil servant will select crisis households and provide customized welfare services such as in-depth consultations and household visits. This pilot project will be carried out until the end of this year, and all 18 neighborhoods in Yeongdeungpo-gu will participate to build a tight welfare safety net.

Yeongdeungpo-gu Mayor Choi Ho-kwon said, “Through this project, we will do our best to quickly discover households in crisis and provide dense, customized support,” and “We will continue to actively utilize technologies such as artificial intelligence to discover households in crisis, creating a Yeongdeungpo-gu where everyone is happy and no neighbors are left out.”

In addition, Yeongdeungpo-gu is promoting various projects to discover and care for socially isolated households through ‘AI well-being check-up service’ and ‘smart plug’.