Publication

Robots in healthcare: Interdisciplinary co-design and technoethics education

Conference Article

Conference

Robophilosophy Conference (RP)

Edition

RP2024

Pages

15-16

Doc link

http://dx.doi.org/10.3233/FAIA241482

File

Download the digital copy of the doc pdf document

Abstract

The experience of co-designing two assistive robot prototypes to help people with physical and mental disabilities, respectively, will be described. The first one is a small robot arm, equipped with a camera, a force sensor and an interactive tablet, for feeding people in large healthcare centres, which has been developed by several engineers and a social scientist in our research group, together with the managing team, physicians, nurses, innovation technicians and sixty voluntary patients in the Sociosanitary Park Pere Virgili in Barcelona. The second prototype has been co-designed with a neurologist, a therapist and a social worker to provide cognitive training to the patients in a day-care facility of the ACE Alzheimer Centre in Barcelona. Among the lessons learned, the importance of interdisciplinarity, human-centric deployment, personalization, and technoethics training stand out. Materials to teach a course on ‘Ethics of Social Robotics and AI’ and to foster debate, by exploiting the engaging appeal of science fiction narrative, will be presented. While social robotics shares several ethics issues with AI, embodiment makes a huge difference in other aspects, some beneficial and some riskier.

Categories

artificial intelligence, intelligent robots, service robots, social aspects of automation.

Author keywords

Co-design, assistive robotics, human-centric technology development, interdiscplinarity, technoethics education

Scientific reference

C. Torras. Robots in healthcare: Interdisciplinary co-design and technoethics education, RP2024 Robophilosophy Conference, 2024, Aarhus (Denmark), in Social Robots with AI: Prospects, Risks, and Responsible Methods. Proceedings of Robophilosophy 2024, Vol 397 of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence and Applications, pp. 15-16, 2024, IOS Press, London.