Gyeonggi Province to Introduce AI-Based Child Meal Support System Next Year

Gyeonggi Province is set to become the first in the nation to fully advance the "Gyeonggi Province Child Meal Support Platform" with a system based on artificial intelligence (AI) and big data.

On July 7, Gyeonggi Province announced that from the 2nd to the 4th, it held four regional business briefings and discussion sessions (covering the southern, northern, eastern regions, and local child centers) to design an effective system.

The purpose of these business briefings and discussion sessions was to actively incorporate the experiences and opinions of frontline public officials and practitioners who have been handling child meal support tasks. The sessions aimed to explore ways to improve current issues such as reducing administrative workload, managing subsidies, and enhancing budget execution efficiency. In particular, the focus was on increasing the practicality and acceptability of the newly introduced AI-based system.

Through the discussion sessions, Gyeonggi Province gathered the following suggestions: enhancing the convenience of subsidy execution for local child centers by enabling expenditure requests and approvals via the app; standardizing different subsidy settlement forms used by cities and counties and implementing automatic aggregation and settlement functions for subsidy execution status; providing analysis reports on subsidy execution status by city, county, and center; and enabling real-time monitoring of misuse of child meal cards.

Gyeonggi Province plans to reflect these on-site insights in all aspects of system development, including improving system functions using AI and enhancing user convenience.

Kwon Munju, Director of Child Care at Gyeonggi Province, stated, "Gyeonggi Province's AI-based child meal support system goes beyond simply introducing technology. It will reduce the workload for city and county officials, enhance convenience for users, and simplify unnecessary administrative procedures for local child centers." He added, "We will do our utmost to create a meal service that provides real benefits to children through close cooperation with the field."

Meanwhile, the "2025 Gyeonggi Province Child Meal Support Platform Advancement" project, which Gyeonggi Province is promoting as a national first, includes AI-powered meal and nutrition analysis services, customized AI meal recommendations for local child centers, AI-based automatic subsidy settlement, improved budget execution efficiency through AI big data analysis, real-time monitoring of meal card misuse, and chatbot services.

Gyeonggi Province will pursue system development and pilot operations in the second half of this year, aiming for full-scale implementation of the advanced system next year.