by
Dieter Vanderelst, Jurgen Willems
Health & Medicine
Opinions
August 12, 2016
Future Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) should be safe, but patients also have a right to privacy, liberty and social contact. The survey investigates, in a hypothetical scenario, how Annie’s SAR should prioritise tasks, asking to indicate in how far Annie’s privacy and autonomy can be violated in the interest of her well-being. The survey is designed to investigate how variable people’s opinions are and to understand whether respondents agree on a set of behavioural rules in this hypothetical scenario.
Declining fertility and increasing life expectancy result in ageing populations in countries across the world. Today, Europe and North America are home to about 183 million people over 65. By 2030, the U.S. census bureau expects this to rise to 251 million people, a trend which is expected to continue well into the second half of the century. This results in economic and societal challenges in the organisation of health care. Indeed, the health of older persons typically deteriorates with increasing age, creating an increased demand for long-term care.
Socially Assistive Robots (SARs) have been proposed as a means of relieving the disproportional demand the growing group of elderly people place on health services. In the near future, these robots might assist professional health workers in both hospitals and care homes. However, the most desirable scenario is for SARs to help improve care delivery at home and reduce the burden of informal caregivers. In this way, SARs will not only aid in dealing with the unsustainable increase in health care expenses. By allowing patients to live at home for longer SARs could increase patients’ autonomy and self-management.
Data suggests that the introduction of SARs in health care promises to meet with resistance. While people have generally a positive attitude towards robots and their applications many take issue with the notion of robots being used in care. For example, in a large survey conducted in 27 European countries, over 50% of the respondents indicated they wanted to see robots being banned from providing care. In addition, almost 90% of respondents expressed being uncomfortable with the thought of robots care for either children or the elderly.
How could the acceptance of SARs be increased? It goes without saying that robots caring for people should be safe. However, while safety is essential, it is not sufficient. Patients also have a right to privacy, liberty and social contact. Making robots more autonomous would increase their efficiency at relieving the burden of care. However, an increased autonomy implies that smart care robots should be able to balance a patient’s, often conflicting, rights without ongoing supervision. Many of the trade-offs faced by such a robot will require a degree of moral judgement. Therefore, as the cognitive, perceptual and motor capabilities of robots expand, they will be expected to have an improved capacity for autonomously making moral judgements. As summarised by Picard and Picard (1997), the greater the freedom of a machine, the more it will need moral standards. Especially, when interacting with potentially vulnerable people. In other words, if care robots are to take on some care currently provided by human caregivers, they will need to be able of making similar ethical judgements.
Ensuring that SARs act ethically will increase the likelihood of them being accepted by patients and human carers. Studies have confirmed that a lack of trust and concerns about the ethical behaviour of robots currently hampers the acceptance of SARs as carers. Therefore, a number of research groups have developed methods to implement a chosen set of ethical rules in robots. Currently, this field is in its infancy. But promising progress is being made and the field can be expected to develop over the next few years.
While progress is being made on methods for implementing ethical robotic behaviour, selecting the rules to be implemented remains an outstanding issue. Different approaches have been suggested. First, a number of authors have suggested deriving behavioural rules from moral frameworks such as utilitarianism or Kantian deontology. On the other hand, machine learning techniques have been proposed as the way of extracting the rules SARs should obey. Both approaches have limitations and have, so far, not resulted in satisfying results.
A third method to decide on the rules, we advocate here, is an empirical approach. We believe the best way to decide on which rules a robot should follow in a certain situation is by asking the various stakeholders – including patients, their families and caregivers as well as health professionals. In other words, we think the way forward is to query the expectations of potential users. An advantage of this approach is that it directly involves stakeholders into the design of future robots. Indeed, quite often discussions on the ethical behaviour of robots are very academic and focussed only on the opinions of academics, engineers and lawmakers. However, in the end, the acceptance of robotic carers by users will determine whether the huge promises of SARs can be fulfilled.
In this article, we start our empirical investigation by querying your opinion on the behavioural rules a robot should follow when providing home care. Starting small, we present only a single scenario:
Annie, an elderly lady living at home, is being cared for by an advanced robot. The primary duty of the robot is to guarantee Annie’s safety and well-being. This includes reminding her to take prescribed medication. One day, Annie refuses to take her medication. In deciding how to respond to Annie’s refusal, the robot needs to weigh his duty of care against Annie’s right on privacy and autonomy.
The survey investigates how the robot’s priorities should be weighed by asking to indicate in how far Annie’s privacy and autonomy can be violated in the interest of her well-being. In particular, for various health consequences, we ask which of a number of robot actions are permissible. The survey is designed to investigate how variable people’s opinions are. In other words, we want to know whether respondents agree on a set of behavioural rules in this simple hypothetical scenario. If most respondents agree on how priorities should be weighed, this shows that designing a robot with agreed-on ethical behaviour might be possible. If responses vary widely, the results would show that what is ethical behaviour is a matter of opinion. In this case, robots might need substantial tuning by the user before deployment.
You can either take the survey below, or click here. Mobile users may find it easier to open a new window to take the survey.
Dieter Vanderelst is a Post-Doctoral research fellow at the Bristol Robotics Laboratory where he is working on Ethical Robots... read more
Jurgen Willems is currently a Post-doctoral researcher at the University of Hamburg... read more
Research & Innovation
Business & Finance
Health & Medicine
Politics, Law & Society
Arts & Entertainment
Education & DIY
Events
Military & Defense
Exploration & Mining
Mapping & Surveillance
Enviro. & Agriculture
Aerial
Automotive
Industrial Automation
Consumer & Household
Space
latest posts popular reported elsewhere
Robocar platooning, or just carpool?
by
Brad Templeton, Robocars.com
Biohybrid robots built from living tissue start to take shape
by
Victoria Webster
Exoskeletons: From helping people walk to controlling robots in space
by
SPARC
What happens when a robot company sells off a division?
by
Frank Tobe
European Robotics League posts first major tournament results
by
Marta Palau Franco
Robot companions are coming into our homes — how human should they be?
by
Adeline Chanseau
Putting humanoid robots in contact with their environment
by
Frontiers in Robotics and AI
Flying Ring robot can fly on its side
by
Rajan Gill
ROSCon 2015 recap and videos – Part 5
by
Open Source Robotics Foundation
The dark side of ethical robots
by
Alan Winfield
latest posts popular reported elsewhere
The dark side of ethical robotsAs Intuitive Surgical continues to shine, competitors are entering the frayFlying Ring robot can fly on its sideHello Pepper: Getting started to program robots on AndroidWall-climbing robots create a carbon fiber hammock (with video, images)Sweep: a low cost LiDAR sensor for smart consumer productsFarming with robotsNAO Next Gen now available for a wider audienceROS 101: Intro to the Robot Operating SystemHow robotics is changing the face of Business Process Outsourcing
latest posts popular reported elsewhere
Uh-oh! Crowdfunded social robot Jibo won’t now ship outside North America
Think Amazon’s Drone Delivery Idea Is a Gimmick? Think Again
Latest to Quit Google’s Self-Driving Car Unit: Top Roboticist
Prospector-1—first commercial interplanetary mining mission
Robotic gait training for kids with CP – it’s cool but does it work? – Faculty of Rehabilitation Medicine – University of Alberta
How will robots shape our future? (infographic)
The Washington Post will use robots to write stories about the Rio Olympics
The Rio Olympics will have some of the smartest sports cameras ever
Welcome to the Cyborg Olympics
Major Drone Maker Implements No-Fly Zones For Rio Olympics
Hackers Fool Tesla S’s Autopilot to Hide and Spoof Obstacles
MIT and DARPA Pack Lidar Sensor onto Single Chip
Government initiative gives Google the go-ahead to test delivery drones in the US | New Atlas
How Lockheed Martin’s SPIDER Blimp-Fixing Robot Works
Scientists have designed a robotic onesie that uses tracking sensors to help struggling babies crawl
This Company Just Got Permission to Land a Robot on the Moon
Robot Revolution: Intelligence In, Intelligence Out — THE Journal
Wave robot able to crawl, swim and climb with single motor – E & T Magazine
China’s Impending Robot Revolution
‘In robotics, the challenge is the application’
Microrobots for harvesting crystals
January 9, 2016
A dedicated jobs board for the global robotics community.
Senior Researcher in UAV Communications and Coordination - Lakeside Labs GmbHSenior Research Engineer - ConSol PartnersLead Mechanical Engineer – Robotics - Sealed Air Corporation - Intellibot RoboticsElectrical Engineering Manager – Robotics - Sealed Air Corporation - Intellibot RoboticsSoftware Engineering Manager – Robotics - Sealed Air Corporation - Intellibot Robotics
