CLOVA CareCall – AI-Enabled Welfare Check-In Calls for Elderly Living Alone

Overview

CLOVA CareCall is an artificial intelligence-powered telephone service developed by NAVER Cloud Corporation that conducts routine welfare check-in calls to elderly individuals living alone and other vulnerable single-person households across South Korea. The system uses large language model technology to initiate automated phone conversations that monitor the health, wellbeing, and safety status of recipients, with the primary objective of preventing solitary deaths among isolated elderly populations and enabling a shift from reactive to preventive welfare administration.

The service is built on NAVER's proprietary HyperCLOVA X, a Korean language-specific multilingual large language model that represents South Korea's first hyperscale AI system. HyperCLOVA X was specifically adapted for the CareCall application through fine-tuning on large-scale conversational datasets and the application of unlikelihood training techniques to reduce off-topic responses. The system is designed to simulate natural human conversation and emotional warmth, having been trained on tens of thousands of question-and-answer scenarios. A distinctive technical feature is the 'Remember' function, which enables the AI to retain and utilise information from past dialogues across multiple interactions, allowing for continuous and contextually aware engagement with each individual user over time. The system is capable of handling diverse speech patterns including unclear pronunciation, regional dialects, and colloquial expressions commonly encountered among elderly Korean speakers.

CLOVA CareCall was originally deployed in 2021, predating ChatGPT by approximately one year, making it one of the earliest large-scale deployments of LLM technology in a public health context globally. The service was initially developed during the COVID-19 pandemic for fever monitoring purposes and was subsequently repurposed for broader elderly welfare check-ins and emotional support services. Beta testing commenced in the Haeundae district of Busan, where after one month of operation, 90 out of 100 enrolled seniors requested to continue using the service. The system was offered free of charge by NAVER during the trial phase.

The service operates through a two-tiered workflow. First, the AI system initiates regular automated phone calls — typically twice weekly — to registered elderly users living alone. During these calls, the system checks on health status indicators including sleep quality, meal consumption, physical discomfort, and exercise levels through natural conversational dialogue. Second, social workers and welfare officials receive the call recordings along with AI-generated analyses that flag abnormalities or distress signals, enabling immediate confirmation and prompt intervention where necessary. This human oversight model ensures that welfare officers can identify signs of health deterioration, emotional distress, or emergency situations flagged by the AI system and take appropriate action.

As of 2024, CLOVA CareCall has been implemented across approximately 150 institutions throughout South Korea, including municipalities in Seoul, Gyeonggi, Busan, Daegu, Gwangju, North Jeolla, Gangwon, and South Chungcheong provinces. The service serves an estimated 50,000 older adults. A joint study conducted by NAVER Cloud and Yonsei University's ESG and Business Ethics Research Center, titled the 'Naver CareCall Social Value Measurement' report and led by Professors Ho-young Lee and Young-seok Bang, analysed publicly available municipal data comparing service regions with non-service areas. The study found that CLOVA CareCall was correlated with a 44.2 percent decrease in solitary deaths in localities where the programme operates, a 9.2 percent reduction in emergency room visits, and a 1.5 percent increase in general hospital visits — the latter attributed to earlier detection of health issues prompting users to seek preventive care before conditions worsen. The estimated annual social value of the service is approximately KRW 34 billion (approximately USD 22.7 million), with projections suggesting that extending the service to 20 percent of South Korea's elderly population could generate preventive medical benefits valued at KRW 417.2 billion annually.

User engagement and satisfaction rates have been high. Sources report that 96 percent of all users respond to CLOVA CareCall's calls and share daily greetings, with internal surveys showing an average user satisfaction rate of approximately 90 percent nationwide. There are documented cases where the system has directly contributed to saving lives in emergencies; for example, in Suncheon City, a welfare officer identified signs of health abnormalities in a user's speech patterns during an AI-generated call analysis and successfully facilitated emergency medical intervention for a cirrhosis patient.

The system was developed by NAVER Cloud Corporation in collaboration with the Seoul National University AI Policy Initiative (SAPI). The research underpinning the system has been published at leading academic venues, with papers presented at NAACL 2022 and EMNLP 2022, and the system was awarded Best Paper at ACM CHI 2023 for research examining the benefits and challenges of deploying conversational AI leveraging large language models for public health intervention.

Data privacy measures include explicit consent requirements for the collection of personal information, with separate consent procedures for sensitive health-related information, and the use of advanced encryption techniques for voice data storage. However, the probabilistic nature of the underlying LLM technology presents ongoing challenges for response control and consistency. Developers have noted inherent difficulties in maintaining absolute control over LLM outputs, and local government requests for domain-specific modifications — such as incorporating dementia screening questions — require generating entirely new training datasets, a resource-intensive process that cannot guarantee consistent inclusion of targeted queries. Academic observers have cautioned that leaving senior care entirely in the hands of AI would be inappropriate, emphasising that the technology should supplement rather than replace human interaction and oversight.

Classification

Programme Details

Local government welfare programmes targeting elderly individuals living alone and vulnerable single-person households. CLOVA CareCall is deployed by municipal authorities across South Korea as a tool for automated welfare monitoring, supplementing existing social worker-led outreach and community care systems.

Implementation Details

Agentic AI

Risk & Oversight

Deployment & Outcomes

Sources

1. SRC-002-KOR-003 Park, C. (2022) 'In South Korea, AI phone calls check up on lonely seniors in a country ageing faster than Japan', South China Morning Post, 14 February. Available at: https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3166142/south-korea-ai-phone-calls-check-lonely-seniors-country-ageing (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3166142/south-korea-ai-phone-calls-check-lonely-seniors-country-ageing
2. SRC-003-KOR-003 European Commission (n.d.) 'AI for people: CLOVA Carecall Service by NAVER', Futurium – European AI Alliance. Available at: https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en/european-ai-alliance/best-practices/ai-people-clova-carecall-service-naver (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://futurium.ec.europa.eu/en/european-ai-alliance/best-practices/ai-people-clova-carecall-service-naver
3. SRC-004-KOR-003 NAVER CLOVA (2023) 'CLOVA CareCall Research Paper: Understanding the Benefits and Challenges of Deploying Conversational AI Leveraging Large Language Models for Public Health Intervention', CLOVA Tech Blog. Available at: https://clova.ai/en/tech-blog/en-clova-carecall-research-paper-understanding-the-benefits-and-challenges-of-deploying-conversational-ai-leveraging-large-language-models-for-public-health-intervention (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://clova.ai/en/tech-blog/en-clova-carecall-research-paper-understanding-the-benefits-and-challenges-of-deploying-conversational-ai-leveraging-large-language-models-for-public-health-intervention
4. SRC-005-KOR-003 NAVER Corporation and Seoul National University AI Policy Initiative (2022) 'Knowledge Interactive, CLOVA CareCall: NAVER-SAPI AI Report 2022 Case Study'. Seoul: NAVER Corporation. Available at: https://www.navercorp.com/static/20230830170049_2.pdf (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://www.navercorp.com/static/20230830170049_2.pdf
5. SRC-001-KOR-003 The Pickool (2025) 'Naver AI CareCall Reduces Solitary Deaths by 44.2%', The Pickool, [online]. Available at: https://www.thepickool.com/naver-ai-carecall-reduces-solitary-deaths-by-44-2/ (Accessed: 25 March 2026).
   https://www.thepickool.com/naver-ai-carecall-reduces-solitary-deaths-by-44-2/