Aging between Participation and Simulation

This publication aims to initiate an interdisciplinary discourse on the ethical, legal, and social implications of socially assistive technologies in healthcare. It combines practically relevant insights and examples from current research and development with ethical analysis to uncover moral pitfalls at the intersection between the promotion of social participation and well-being, and risks that may diminish the achievement of these ends

Managing the Human Service Market: The Case of Long-Term Care in Japan

Providing human service through competitive markets is inherently problematic. On one hand, quality care is critical; unsatisfactory human service greatly influences people’s quality of life. On the other hand, profit for human service providers is essential for sustainable service provision. This thesis focuses on striking a balance between human services’ need for quality assurance and market providers’ need for profit. The research primarily examines the provision of long-term care for the elderly in Japan, which has the biggest share of aged population among the OECD members. Two research questions guide the empirical research: 1. How should governments design the human service market in order to keep the capacity to ensure the quality of service? 2. How should governments set the performance measurement for quality care? The research presents and tests two models. The first model addresses market competition practices and offers an alternative care quality model, called Ideal CQM. Ideal CQM seeks to overcome deficiencies in the existing care quality model, which allows the market to accommodate poor quality care. To this end, Ideal CQM presents a theoretical market design in which quality of care is the sole basis for market competition. By implementing Idea CQM, governments can direct the market competition to enhance the quality of care and poor quality service can be automatically eliminated from the market. The second model addresses performance measurement and is a process-based model, which values the experiences of front-line care workers. The process-based performance measurement seeks to overcome deficiencies in the existing outcome-based performance measurement, which is rendered ineffectual by two unique features of human service: ambiguous policy goals and a considerable amount of front-line worker discretion. This thesis, thus, modifies the existing concept of market competition utilising public administration theory to accommodate the process-based performance measurement model. The research supports the use of market competition to provide human service for long-term care. Approving the workability and the practicability of the presented two models, the thesis concludes that governments can achieve balance between quality assurance and sustainable provision, if they are willing to meet the required conditions for implementation of the two models

Aging between Participation and Simulation

This publication aims to initiate an interdisciplinary discourse on the ethical, legal, and social implications of socially assistive technologies in healthcare. It combines practically relevant insights and examples from current research and development with ethical analysis to uncover moral pitfalls at the intersection between the promotion of social participation and well-being, and risks that may diminish the achievement of these ends

Overcoming barriers and increasing independence: service robots for elderly and disabled people

This paper discusses the potential for service robots to overcome barriers and increase independence of elderly and disabled people. It includes a brief overview of the existing uses of service robots by disabled and elderly people and advances in technology which will make new uses possible and provides suggestions for some of these new applications. The paper also considers the design and other conditions to be met for user acceptance. It also discusses the complementarity of assistive service robots and personal assistance and considers the types of applications and users for which service robots are and are not suitable

Robots in healthcare? What patients say

Ajuts: This research was funded by "la Caixa" Foundation under agreement LCF/PR/RC17/10110004.In this paper, we analyse patients' perspectives on the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotic systems in healthcare. Based on citizens' experiences when hospitalised for COVID- 19, we explore how the opinions and concerns regarding healthcare automation could not be disas-sociated from a context of high pressure on the health system and lack of resources, and a political discourse on AI and robotics; a situation intensified by the pandemic. Thus, through the analysis of a set of interviews, a series of issues are identified that revolve around the following: the empirical effects of imagined robots, the vivid experience of citizens with the care crisis, the discomfort of the ineffective, the virtualised care assemblages, the human-based face-to-face relationships, and the automatisation of healthcare tasks. In light of these results, we show the variability in patients' perspectives on AI and robotic systems and explain it by distinguishing two interpretive repertoires that account for different views and opinions: a well-being repertoire and a responsibility repertoire. Both interpretative repertoires are relevant in order to grasp the complexity of citizens' approaches to automatisation of healthcare. Attending to both allows us to move beyond the dominant (politi-cal) discourse of technology markets as the only way to respond to healthcare challenges. Thus, we can analyse and integrate patients' perspectives to develop AI and robotic systems in healthcare to serve citizens' needs and collective well-being

Supporting active and healthy aging with advanced robotics integrated in smart environment

The technological advances in the robotic and ICT fields represent an effective solution to address specific societal problems to support ageing and independent life. One of the key factors for these technologies is the integration of service robotics for optimising social services and improving quality of life of the elderly population. This chapter aims to underline the barriers of the state of the art, furthermore the authors present their concrete experiences to overcome these barriers gained at the RoboTown Living Lab of Scuola Superiore Sant'Anna within past and current projects. They analyse and discuss the results in order to give recommendations based on their experiences. Furthermore, this work highlights the trend of development from stand-alone solutions to cloud computing architecture, describing the future research directions

Criteria of implementing feeding assistance robots in disability care

This article discusses the entanglement of implementing welfare technology in disability care, and draws on ethnographic observations from a pilot project involving 30 disabled citizens from three different boroughs in Denmark. The disabled citizens suffered from diseases such as multiple sclerosis and cerebral paralysis. The article follows four care assistants and four citizens through a period of 10 months, focusing particularly on the experiences and struggle of two citizens. Against this background, the article takes up a number of conflicting values and criteria practiced by diverse interested groups: 1. employee retrenchment, 2. citizen independence and 3. workforce flexibility. The main argument is that the housing institution studied has turned into a battlefield, where professional values of authentic care meet a strong governmental discourse of modernization of the public sector. The study demonstrates that the implementation of welfare technology in disability care is highly fragile, which is predominantly due to the delicate body-technology assembly, and takes place in agony

Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging (ACCRA) Project

__Introduction__ Worldwide population is getting older. The older persons want to stay independent and wish to increase their engagement in social activities to tackle loneliness, depression, and isolation. Starting from these assumptions, we developed the ACCRA project (Agile Co-Creation for Robots and Aging) with the aim to enable the development of advanced ICT Robotics-based solutions for extending active and healthy aging in daily life by defining, developing and demonstrating an agile co-creation development process. __Methods__ ACCRA robotics solutions will be designed and developed to be tested in three different domains: mobility, daily life, socialization support in four countries (i.e., France, Netherlands, Italy, and Japan). The proposed approach identifies four different phases: (1) needs analysis, (2) agile co-creation, (3) experimentation, and (4) sustainability analysis. Currently, the first two phases were almost completed. For the needs phase, we have used the following recruitment criteria: (1) for mobility: age ≥ 60 years, the and presence of mobility issues assessed by Older Mobility Scale (EMS) with a score > 13; (2) for daily life: age ≥ 60 years, and the presence of difficulties engaging in housework assessed by Autonomie Gérontologie Groupes Iso-Ressources (AGGIR) with a GIR score ≥ 4; (3) for socialization support: age ≥ 60 years, and the absence or mild level of cognitive impairment assessed by Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) with a score ≥ 24. __Results__ The needs analysis and first co-creation sessions focus attention on the experience of older in the four countries. Preliminary results showed how, in all the pilot sites, many expectations were raised from older, formal and informal caregivers about the application of the technology into their life. Minor concerns existed about privacy, real efficacy and modularity in a real-world environment. Overall, a good attitude was recorded towards the use of technologies to support life and promote independent living. Moreover, the older engaged in our studies showed a great interest to be actively involved in the developing phase of something built based on their needs. __Conclusions__ The availability of new solutions to increase independence and quality of life in a sustainable manner appears to be mandatory in the actual society considering the actual socio-economic situation over the industrial countries