SHIFT UP Feasibility Study
Evaluating the feasibility of a multilingual conversational AI interface for staff scheduling. BFH and Bio-Optronics Sàrl, part of the BioSked Group, jointly explore technical, legal, and user aspects to guide product development decisions.
Factsheet
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Schools involved
School of Health Professions
School of Engineering and Computer Science - Institute(s) Nursing
- Research unit(s) Innovation in the Field of Health Care and Human Resources Development
- Funding organisation Others
- Duration (planned) 01.11.2025 - 30.06.2026
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Head of project
Prof. Dr. Christoph Golz
Prof. Dr. Murat Sariyar -
Project staff
Tanja Siegenthaler
Fabienne Josefine Renggli - Partner Bio-Optronics Sàrl
- Keywords AI, healthcare, scheduling,
Situation
Healthcare organizations struggle to manage complex staff scheduling under increasing workload, skill shortages, and legal constraints. Traditional scheduling systems often remain rigid, time consuming, and cognitively demanding for managers and frontline staff. Emerging conversational AI technologies offer promising support for faster information retrieval, natural language queries, and improved decision assistance. Yet, key questions remain open. Healthcare settings require strong data protection, trustworthy automation, multilingual operation, and alignment with real-world workflows. Many AI solutions focus on general use cases and lack adaptation to clinical contexts, regulatory requirements, and workforce expectations. There is a need to understand whether current language models and interaction patterns can meaningfully support scheduling tasks, whether such systems would be accepted by users, and what technical and legal safeguards are required. This project jointly tackles these challenges by combining applied research expertise with industry know how to generate a realistic basis for strategic development decisions.
Course of action
The project follows a collaborative applied research approach in which BFH and BioSked work closely together from planning to final synthesis. The partners jointly define the scope and key questions and exchange expertise on healthcare scheduling, conversational AI, and implementation conditions in real organizational environments. BFH conducts an exploratory assessment of current technological possibilities along with opportunities and limitations relevant to staff scheduling, including aspects of usability, data protection, and multilingual functionality. In parallel, insights from healthcare professionals and managers are collected to understand needs, expectations, and potential adoption challenges when introducing conversational AI tools in everyday scheduling tasks. At the end, the results are consolidated into a clear, forward looking synthesis that outlines potential value, risks, and next steps for BioSked. This broad feasibility perspective enables a well informed decision on future development activities and collaboration formats.
