Designing robots for care
Lecture given by Aimee van Wijnsberghe on 13 April 2011
Description
Care Centered Value Sensitive Design: designing robots for care
The use of robots in the care of elderly people - what I refer to as care robots - is quickly approaching. Given the sensitive contexts and practices into which these robots will be stepping, and the vulnerable demographic for which they will be used, ethical attention is required of their design and development. Interestingly, no guidelines for the design or regulation of such robots exist to date. This presentation aims to present a methodology in which ethicists and roboticists may proceed with an ethical analysis pertaining to the design of care robots. The underlying idea is to assist with creating care robots that promote the fundamental values in care through their use. I present a framework consisting of five components for the ethical analysis of care robots. The framework's components are: context, practice, actors, values as the moral elements in care and, type of robot. Using the framework one is able to analyse the components of good care practices with and without the introduction of the care robot. By understanding how the capabilities of these robots impact the manifestation of the moral elements of care - the fundamental values of any and every care practice - designers have a deeper understanding of how the design of a care robot may change and shape the future of care. By completing a retrospective evaluation in this manner my aim is to highlight the relationship between technical content of the robot and the resulting care practice as well as to provide prospective suggestions for the design of future care robots
Speaker(s)
Aimee van Wynsberghe is currently doing her PhD in Philosophy at the University of Twente, the Netherlands. During her undergraduate degree in Cell Biology at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, she was a research assistant at CSTAR (Canadian Surgical Technologies and Advanced Robotics) working on the Telesurgery project (long distance robotic surgery) which inspired her to continue working with robots. Following her studies in Science at UWO, she pursued a Masters in Applied Ethics at K.U. Leuven, Belgium and an Erasmus Mundus Masters in Bioethics. This gave her the opportunity to reflect on the philosophical issues pertaining to technology in healthcare, with a particular focus on robotics. Her current work focuses on the social and ethical implications of human-robot interactions, but specifically addresses the use of robots in the care of elderly persons by targeting issues of design.
Location
Utrecht
Organiser
Philosophy & Technology
Name and contact details for information
Further information from drs.ing. Henk Uijttenhout (vz), tel: 070 - 3875293 / 06 - 42505844 or via the e-mail address below