Granny and the robots: ethical issues in robot care for the elderly

Abstract

The growing proportion of elderly people in society, together with recent advances in robotics, makes the use of robots in elder care increasingly likely. We outline developments in the areas of robot applications for assisting the elderly and their carers, for monitoring their health and safety, and for providing them with companionship. Despite the possible benefits, we raise and discuss six main ethical concerns associated with: (1) the potential reduction in the amount of human contact; (2) an increase in the feelings of objectification and loss of control; (3) a loss of privacy; (4) a loss of personal liberty; (5) deception and infantilisation; (6) the circumstances in which elderly people should be allowed to control robots. We conclude by balancing the care benefits against the ethical costs. If introduced with foresight and careful guidelines, robots and robotic technology could improve the lives of the elderly, reducing their dependence, and creating more opportunities for social interaction

Mobile assistive technologies for the visually impaired

“…Although mobile robots can now be used in healthcare (especially eldercare 20 ), in smart homes, in therapy to assist individuals with manual tasks, to help decrease loneliness, or to act as a virtual interface to provide remote monitoring and communication 44 , there are ethical issues concerning individuals' sense of freedom, dignity, and their human rights 82,86 , discussion of which are outside the scope of this review. In addition, because the focus of this review is on mobile assistive devices for the visually impaired, a large proportion of the published research covering smart homes and robotics has been excluded on the grounds that it is not specifically designed for the visually impaired.…”

Can robots be responsible moral agents? And why should we care?

“…Ethical concerns have been expressed about the risks of leaving vulnerable older people in the near-exclusive 'care' of robots, with little human contact, (e.g. Sharkey and Sharkey, 2012;Sparrow and Sparrow 2006), but the 7 Human Rights Act does not provide any explicit protection from such a situation.…”

Ethical values and social care robots for older people: an international qualitative study

“…For instance, Sharkey and Sharkey (2012) and Kortner (2016) highlight a range of issues related specifically to the care of older people; Coeckelbergh (2015) relates intuitions about care, autonomy and related notions to general considerations about modernity; and, van Wynsberghe (2013) applies the theoretical perspective of care ethics to produce her value-sensitive design approach. Similarly, Vallor (2011) provides a comprehensive review of relevant ethics literature up to 2010 in her analysis of the ideal of care in relation to the use care-providing technology; Sparrow (2015) argues that robotic design for older users should be geared to promoting happiness rather than to achieving seemingly objective measures of welfare; and, Matthias (2015) Combining the results of phases one and two to produce an empirically informed ethical framework Fig.…”

“…We offer one example here, which relates to concerns that some kinds of robots are infantilising. Such concerns (discussed and countered by Sharkey and Sharkey 2012) are mainly to do with robots that look like children's toys. Our data suggested another potentially infantilising presentation of enablement to older people.…”