The first project aims to support people through early interventions and to provide meaningful, cost-effective ways for people to manage their own health and wellbeing.

Over the last five years, good progress has been made to achieve benefits through the use of digital technologies, but this will now be expanded further to consider technology widely available to the whole population and cutting-edge technology applied to care and support. This will be identified, tested and adopted at scale where benefits are shown.

Similarly, the use of digital technology, and more specifically AI, will help to make real improvements within the Care at Home Staff Management System. This innovative project will provide a fit-for-purpose monitoring, scheduling and digital management system, which will improve service quality and free up face-to-face time for caring activities.

It will enable a move away from mainly paper-based service delivery to a system where there is real-time access to updated service user information. The newer digital systems will also introduce dynamic scheduling, which involves using AI to automatically assign visits based on certain parameters and availability. AI-powered capacity checkers will also allow almost immediate calculation of whether there is current and future capacity to accommodate new requests for care services, a process that is completely manual at the moment and extremely time-consuming.

These project proposals, as well as three others, are part of the East Ayrshire Innovation Fund which was established to support services in taking forward projects that aim to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and accessibility of council services. As well as delivering tangible service improvements, some of the innovative projects will also create financial savings that are then repaid to the fund at the conclusion of each project.

Other projects include an online literacy resource, replacing the current cashless catering system in schools and purchasing two robotic cleaners which would be trialled at Barony Campus and William McIlvanney Campus.

Councillor Douglas Reid, leader of the council, said: “These innovative projects all have huge potential to bring about real service improvements as well as allowing us to reinvest in continuous innovation over the coming years. This is something that is particularly important given the difficult financial position that the Council is currently facing.

“The increased use of digital technology, smart supports and AI will literally help to improve people’s quality of life, while we expect to see other positive outcomes such as the roll-out of early intervention and prevention projects and the development of more collaborative partnerships.

“We will obviously be closely monitoring these projects and evaluating their effectiveness, and a large part of this will involve gathering feedback from employees and service users to understand the benefits that these five exciting projects will no doubt provide.”