AI exposure: Home Health Aides
Monitor the health status of an individual with disabilities or illness, and address their health-related needs, such as changing bandages, dressing wounds, or administering medication. Work is performed under the direction of offsite or intermittent onsite licensed nursing staff. Provide assistance with routine healthcare tasks or activities of daily living, such as feeding, bathing, toileting, or ambulation. May also help with tasks such as preparing meals, doing light housekeeping, and doing laundry depending on the patient's abilities.
Reading this score
computedHome Health Aides is among the least exposed occupations measured, at 6.0% of weighted task load, rank 862 of 923. 87.2% of this job is work current AI systems cannot produce at all. That is not a statement about skill or value. It is a statement about what these systems can and cannot do.
What holds the line here is embodiment. Across this occupation's 15 tasks it averages 2.73 out of 3, the highest of the five friction dimensions. In plain terms, the work has to happen in physical space. A language model cannot move matter. Until the robotics to do this work is both good enough and cheap enough to deploy widely, capability in software does not reach it.
The most exposed thing this job does is Maintain records of patient care, condition, progress, or problems to report and discuss..., at 60.0%. The least is Massage patients or apply preparations or treatments, at 0.0%. A gap of 60.0% between two parts of the same job is the reason this index publishes at task level. An occupation-wide number would have hidden both.
Within healthcare support occupations, this one is less exposed than the median of 12.0% across the group's 19 roles, with 17 scoring higher. Being in an exposed family does not make a particular job exposed, and the reverse holds too.
What would move this score. Of 15 tasks, 1 are currently banded exposed, 0 assisted and 14 untouched. For that distribution to shift materially would take robotics cheap and reliable enough to deploy at scale, not a better language model. The score is re-computed every quarter against a fresh capability reference, and the change is published rather than quietly applied.
Where the score comes from
judgedEvery task is scored through the standardised work activities it maps to. These are this occupation’s averages on the six rubric dimensions. Capability is what AI can do; the other five are what stands in the way.
| Dimension | Mean | Scale |
|---|---|---|
| Capability | 0.40 | 0-4 |
| Embodiment | 2.73 | 0-3 |
| Presence | 2.73 | 0-3 |
| Accountability | 1.67 | 0-3 |
| Context | 1.47 | 0-3 |
| Verification cost | 1.67 | 0-3 |
Task by task
15 tasks, O*NET 31.0| Task | Exposed | Assisted | Untouched | Importance | Band |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Maintain records of patient care, condition, progress, or problems to report and discuss observations with supervisor or case manager. | 60.0% | 40.0% | 0.0% | 4.48 | exposed |
| Provide patients and families with emotional support and instruction in areas such as caring for infants, preparing healthy meals, living independently, or adapting to disability or illness. | 6.7% | 18.3% | 75.0% | 4.11 | untouched |
| Check patients' pulse, temperature, and respiration. | 3.3% | 21.7% | 75.0% | 4.30 | untouched |
| Plan, purchase, prepare, or serve meals to patients or other family members, according to prescribed diets. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.64 | untouched |
| Care for patients by changing bed linens, washing and ironing laundry, cleaning, or assisting with their personal care. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.56 | untouched |
| Bathe patients. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.50 | untouched |
| Provide patients with help moving in and out of beds, baths, wheelchairs, or automobiles and with dressing and grooming. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.37 | untouched |
| Entertain, converse with, or read aloud to patients to keep them mentally healthy and alert. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 4.18 | untouched |
| Direct patients in simple prescribed exercises or in the use of braces or artificial limbs. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.77 | untouched |
| Accompany clients to doctors' offices or on other trips outside the home, providing transportation, assistance, and companionship. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.68 | untouched |
| Administer prescribed oral medications, under the written direction of physician or as directed by home care nurse or aide, and ensure patients take their medicine. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.53 | untouched |
| Perform a variety of duties as requested by client, such as obtaining household supplies or running errands. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.42 | untouched |
| Change dressings. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.40 | untouched |
| Care for children with disabilities or who have sick parents or parents with disabilities. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.38 | untouched |
| Massage patients or apply preparations or treatments, such as liniment, alcohol rubs, or heat-lamp stimulation. | 0.0% | 0.0% | 100.0% | 3.20 | untouched |
Task text and importance ratings sourced from O*NET 31.0. Shares computed. The occupation score is the importance-weighted mean.
Occupations either side of this one
The four closest scores in the same occupational family, then the four closest anywhere in the index.
Read this carefully. Exposure is not displacement. A high score means current AI systems can produce this work, not that anyone will stop paying a person to do it. Adoption depends on economics, regulation and inertia that this index deliberately does not model. How the score is built.
What this means in practice
Most of this work is not reachable by current systems, so the immediate pressure is on the administrative edges of the role rather than its core: the scheduling, the reporting, the written records. That is where time is recovered.