University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka researchers will harness the power of AI to help New Zealanders live healthier lives as part recipients of the 2025 Catalyst: Strategic New Zealand-Singapore Research Programme.
Announced as part of the government's Catalyst Fund, designed to deepen research ties with Singapore, the investment will focus on three research projects at New Zealand universities in the Leveraging AI for Healthy Ageing category. It is aimed at developing artificial intelligence (AI) tools to improve the health of older New Zealanders – with all three projects featuring Otago researchers.
An Otago-led project will receive $4 million to partner with AI Singapore (AISG), using AI to partly automate current health assessments of older people. Called AI-Assisted inteRAI Assessment, the aim is to free up health professionals to spend more time with patients and reduce waiting lists.
Hamish Jamieson
Project lead, University of Otago, Christchurch, Associate Professor and Gerontologist Hamish Jamieson says like many countries, New Zealand undertakes about 100,000 mandated, standardised assessments of older people every year suffering from health conditions such as incontinence, malnutrition, frailty, memory loss and pain, in order to improve their outcome and quality of life.
"This personalised assessment, while vital, is currently completely manual, taking up to two hours to complete per patient, with health professionals spending hundreds of hours synthesising information buried in patient medical records," Associate Professor Jamieson says.
"Our aim with this study is to test AI to see if the assessment can be partly automated while maintaining the quality, using AI to securely scan electronic medical notes or ask patients questions directly."
He says if successful, the project could help ease some challenges posed by the ageing population.
"This could potentially free up the time of hundreds of health professionals allowing them to spend more time organising care for older people, see more of patients in the same time frame, and reduce waiting lists."
The three-year project, which plans to start next month, will use anonymised data from half a million New Zealanders aged 55 and over.
"Although AI is new it has huge potential," Associate Professor Jamieson says.
"There are risks and we must test with caution, but there is the potential to make real gains and take pressure off a busy health system. It will only be applied if it is acceptable to patients and is as or more reliable than the current way of doing the assessment."
Tania Moerenhout
Fellow Otago researcher and GP Dr Tania Moerenhout, Senior Lecturer at the Bioethics Centre, is part of a University of Victoria Wellington-led project that will deliver a mobile-first, AI-augmented app that combines real-time speech analysis and gamified cognitive tasks to detect early signs of cognitive decline, provide personalised training, and generate actionable insights for care partners and clinicians.
Dr Moerenhout will lead a dedicated ethics team bringing a pioneering integrated ethics pathway to the project, ensuring that user values, autonomy, and privacy are prioritised from the earliest design stages.
"Older adults may prioritise autonomy and meaningful living, while families focus on safety. AI tools must reflect those nuances," she says.
"Embedding ethics across the design process is key to building trust and ensuring the technology truly supports the lives people want to lead."
Dr Moerenhout's team will collaborate closely with the other researchers involved in the development of the app, and engage with different stakeholders, not only users and whānau but also with healthcare providers, to explore ethical tensions and challenges that may arise from use of this technology.
"For this, we build on existing methods in digital health ethics including embedded ethics and value-sensitive design. Our aim is to inform the technology design so these ethical challenges can be managed, steering design decisions, resulting in an ethically responsible platform for cognitive health."
Narun Pat
Dr Narun Pat, from the Department of Psychology, is also working on the Victoria-led project, as well as a role in the third research project lead by University of Auckland, which will build an AI tool to help clinicians identify individuals at high risk of progressing to dementia.
"As an expert in multimodal neuroimaging and machine learning, I am contributing to the development of AI tools that predict dementia risk from multimodal MRI scans collected across Dunedin, Christchurch, Auckland, and Singapore," he says.
"Our collaboration with the healthcare industry ensures that insights from basic neuroimaging science are effectively translated into practical, clinically viable tools."
Acting Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research and Enterprise Dr Martin Gagnon says the Catalyst Fund investment for the Otago-led project reinforces the University of Otago's position as a leader in aged care and healthy aging.
"Leveraging AI tools to speed up assessments, better predict risk factors, and deliver more personalised care will ensure our healthcare system can properly support older New Zealanders.
"By partnering with Singapore's Singapore Management University, this research will continue to strengthen Otago's and New Zealand's international reputation in the rapidly advancing field of applied AI, while continuing to deliver the world-leading and impactful health research that we are known for."
