Given the demands of their work, we recognize the need to support SOS mothers in their professional development in their homes. SOS mothers have limited availability to attend trainings, especially when these require travel. Since the days are busy with domestic tasks, it is often difficult for SOS mothers to quickly meet peers and discuss topics different from the day-to-day issues. Opportunities to improve their skills and share knowledge with peers need to be expanded.
The Digital Care Assistant (DCA) is a solution that brings learning home and enables SOS mothers to improve their knowledge and skills in their day-to-day work. The bot helps SOS caregivers and SOS youth to find answers to challenges in the areas of alternative care, youth care, education or employability. The system will provide its answers based on artificial intelligence (AI) - like a virtual staff member. The user can also be directed to a "real" staff member for further support. The DCA is easily accessible with mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets.
Several DCA functions focus on family life and help SOS mothers plan their day, get information, develop relevant skills, and interact with people they trust. The device is connected to analysis functions that improve the quality of the dialogue over time.
User-driven content development and improvement
By analyzing questions raised by users in real time, checking if the respective answer was satisfactory and determining eventual content gaps, the DCA will support incremental improvements of his content. Creation of new or missing content will be crowdsourced through a specialized platform supporting peer-to-peer content sharing. Experts will curate the new content and assess its relevance before it is added to the Digital Care Assistant. Through a simple interface, content updates of the Digital Care Assistant will be easy, enabling daily, incremental improvements with almost immediate availability to the users.
In a later stage, this crowdsourcing platform will enable peer mentoring and recognition of top contributors with gamification elements. This will further strengthen and build the motivation of the community to continuously develop and improve available content.
How participants benefit from DCA
Care co-workers and programme participants benefit from the Digital Care Assistant in different ways:
- They receive relevant content and knowledge to develop their skills.
- They receive advice on parenthood. You will receive parenting advice.
- They can interact with other caregivers.
- They have access to practical information while doing other tasks.
- They have access to a modern platform that motivates them to use it.
Phase 2: Make DCA available to other children's organizations
In a second phase, this service can also be made available to other national children's organisations around the world. SOS Children's Villages can multiply the impact of a global service provider to support national children's organisations and governments.