The “Zukunft der Pflege” cluster is a joint project funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) to develop and research new care technologies. As a result of demographic change, Germany is facing the major challenge of securing the future of care. Due to the increasing number of people in need of care, it must also be ensured that sufficient nursing staff and caring relatives are available in all care domains. Technological innovations offer the potential to relieve the burden on nursing staff and caregiving relatives in their work and at the same time improve the quality of life of patients.

This is where the cluster, consisting of the Nursing Innovation Center (PIZ) and four Nursing Practice Centers (PPZ), comes in. While the PIZ in Oldenburg concentrates on setting up real-world laboratories for a wide range of care settings (outpatient care, inpatient care, intensive care, nursing service center) and looks specifically for care innovations available on the market as well as conducting its own research in the fields of robotics, augmented reality and virtual reality, the PPZs in Freiburg, Nuremberg, Berlin and Hanover focus not only on their own research but also on testing the technologies discovered in everyday nursing practice, as it is ultimately practical suitability that determines whether they are actually introduced into everyday life.