The current series of city lectures began on Tuesday, May 6, 2025 with the lecture “Colleague robot, please take over? – Solutions for the care of the future” at the student café Zur Auszeit in Hof.
Around fifty guests from the city of Hof and the surrounding area listened to the lecture by Professor Dr.-Ing. Dietmar Wolff from Hof University of Applied Sciences, who addressed the particularly high unmet need for care in Upper Franconia. The solutions addressed included more attractive working conditions, more efficient work organization, greater academization of nursing training, recognition of foreign professional qualifications and orientation towards international models in order to give nursing more competencies – such as issuing follow-up prescriptions.
In Upper Franconia in particular, the nursing shortage will affect us sooner and more severely – and we will not solve it as we are currently positioned.”
Prof. Dr. Dietmar Wolff
Digitalization of care
The central topic of the evening was digitalization in care. Digital innovations such as assistive technologies should take over routine tasks as a “helping hand”, relieve care staff and give them more time for the essentials. In contrast, the speaker believes that care robots are not yet an option due to their stage of development, but solutions in the form of social robots or service robots are already available. The presentation also addressed the potential of new business models with big data and artificial intelligence, as well as the opportunities and challenges of the telematics infrastructure, e.g. in avoiding unwanted drug interactions or expensive duplicate examinations. He combined this with a fervent appeal for the use of electronic patient records for everyone and dispelled various prejudices in this regard.
Wolff, who also leads his own research group in the field of digitalization of the healthcare system, provided information about existing AI chatbots for untrained people who care for their loved ones privately. He highlighted care finder services and the end-to-end support of processes with innovative software. The subsequent discussion between guests and the speaker revolved around the financing of care, speeding up the approval of medicines, the role of doctors in the healthcare system and shaping the care of the future.
The city lecture
The event is explicitly aimed at the citizens of the city of Hof and the surrounding districts. The venue is the student café “Zur Auszeit” in Hof’s Karolinenstraße. A maximum of 60 people can take part; the order of registration applies. The event is free of charge, drinks and snacks are self-pay.
You can register for the next event on Eventbrite:
Stadtvorlesung Hof: Re-entry into the use of energy from nuclear power? Tickets, Tue, 20.05.2025 at 17:30 | Eventbrite
