881 research outputs found
Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design
The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationshipâwhat I refer to as care robotsârequire rigorous ethical reflection to ensure their design and introduction do not impede the promotion of values and the dignity of patients at such a vulnerable and sensitive time in their lives. The ethical evaluation of care robots requires insight into the values at stake in the healthcare tradition. Whatâs more, given the stage of their development and lack of standards provided by the International Organization for Standardization to guide their development, ethics ought to be included into the design process of such robots. The manner in which this may be accomplished, as presented here, uses the blueprint of the Value-sensitive design approach as a means for creating a framework tailored to care contexts. Using care values as the foundational values to be integrated into a technology and using the elements in care, from the care ethics perspective, as the normative criteria, the resulting approach may be referred to as care centered value-sensitive design. The framework proposed here allows for the ethical evaluation of care robots both retrospectively and prospectively. By evaluating care robots in this way, we may ultimately ask what kind of care we, as a society, want to provide in the futur
Immersive Technologies in Virtual Companions: A Systematic Literature Review
The emergence of virtual companions is transforming the evolution of
intelligent systems that effortlessly cater to the unique requirements of
users. These advanced systems not only take into account the user present
capabilities, preferences, and needs but also possess the capability to adapt
dynamically to changes in the environment, as well as fluctuations in the users
emotional state or behavior. A virtual companion is an intelligent software or
application that offers support, assistance, and companionship across various
aspects of users lives. Various enabling technologies are involved in building
virtual companion, among these, Augmented Reality (AR), and Virtual Reality
(VR) are emerging as transformative tools. While their potential for use in
virtual companions or digital assistants is promising, their applications in
these domains remain relatively unexplored. To address this gap, a systematic
review was conducted to investigate the applications of VR, AR, and MR
immersive technologies in the development of virtual companions. A
comprehensive search across PubMed, Scopus, and Google Scholar yielded 28
relevant articles out of a pool of 644. The review revealed that immersive
technologies, particularly VR and AR, play a significant role in creating
digital assistants, offering a wide range of applications that brings various
facilities in the individuals life in areas such as addressing social
isolation, enhancing cognitive abilities and dementia care, facilitating
education, and more. Additionally, AR and MR hold potential for enhancing
Quality of life (QoL) within the context of virtual companion technology. The
findings of this review provide a valuable foundation for further research in
this evolving field
Challenges in Developing Applications for Aging Populations
Elderly individuals can greatly benefit from the use of computer applications, which can assist in monitoring health conditions, staying in contact with friends and family, and even learning new things. However, developing accessible applications for an elderly user can be a daunting task for developers. Since the advent of the personal computer, the benefits and challenges of developing applications for older adults have been a hot topic of discussion. In this chapter, the authors discuss the various challenges developers who wish to create applications for the elderly computer user face, including age-related impairments, generational differences in computer use, and the hardware constraints mobile devices pose for application developers. Although these challenges are concerning, each can be overcome after being properly identified
Designing robots with the context in mind -- One design does not fit all
Robots' visual qualities (VQs) impact people's perception of their
characteristics and affect users' behaviors and attitudes toward the robot.
Recent years point toward a growing need for Socially Assistive Robots (SARs)
in various contexts and functions, interacting with various users. Since SAR
types have functional differences, the user experience must vary by the context
of use, functionality, user characteristics, and environmental conditions.
Still, SAR manufacturers often design and deploy the same robotic embodiment
for diverse contexts. We argue that the visual design of SARs requires a more
scientific approach considering their multiple evolving roles in future
society. In this work, we define four contextual layers: the domain in which
the SAR exists, the physical environment, its intended users, and the robot's
role. Via an online questionnaire, we collected potential users' expectations
regarding the desired characteristics and visual qualities of four different
SARs: a service robot for an assisted living/retirement residence facility, a
medical assistant robot for a hospital environment, a COVID-19 officer robot,
and a personal assistant robot for domestic use. Results indicated that users'
expectations differ regarding the robot's desired characteristics and the
anticipated visual qualities for each context and use case.Comment: Accepted to the 15th International Workshop on Human-Friendly
Robotic
Make Way for the Robots! Humanâ and MachineâCentricity in Constituting a European PublicâPrivate Partnership
This article is an analytic register of recent European efforts in the making of âautonomousâ robots to address what is imagined as Europeâs societal challenges. The paper describes how an emerging techno-epistemic network stretches across industry, science, policy and law to legitimize and enact a robotics innovation agenda. Roadmap is the main metaphor and organizing tool in working across the disciplines and sectors, and in aligning these heterogeneous actors with a machine-centric vision along a path to make way for ânew kindsâ of robots. We describe what happens as this industry-dominated project docks in a publicâprivate partnership with pan-European institutions and a legislative initiative on robolaw. Emphasizing the co-production of robotics and European innovation politics, we observe how well-known uncertainties and scholarly debates about machine capabilities and humanâmachine configurations, are unexpectedly played out in legal scholarship and institutions as a controversy and a significant problem for human-centered legal frameworks. European robotics are indeed driving an increase in speculative ethics and a new-found weight of possible futures in legislative practice.publishedVersio
Ethics of Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is a digital technology that will be of major importance for the development of humanity in the near future. AI has raised fundamental questions about what we should do with such systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve and how we can control these. -
After the background to the field (1), this article introduces the main debates (2), first on ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e. tools made and used by humans; here, the main sections are privacy (2.1), manipulation (2.2), opacity (2.3), bias (2.4), autonomy & responsibility (2.6) and the singularity (2.7). Then we look at AI systems as subjects, i.e. when ethics is for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (2.8.) and artificial moral agency (2.9). Finally we look at future developments and the concept of AI (3). For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, we outline existing positions and arguments, then we analyse how this plays out with current technologies and finally what policy conse-quences may be drawn
Digital Service: Technological Agency in Service Systems
This paper defines digital service in the context of technologically enhanced value co-creation between service system entities. Progress in digitalization and Artificial Intelligence (AI) is increasing the relative share of technologically enhanced value co-creation between service system entities (e.g., people, companies, nations). Highly automated technical systems increasingly act as autonomous agents, on behalf of service providers, in value co-creation interactions with the system users. Sufficient conceptualization, abstractions and modeling paradigms for research and development of this type of value co-creation are absent from the literature and introduced in this paper. The main contribution of the paper is introduction and definition of digital service and digital service membrane as fundamental concepts in service science and service systems, with directions for future research on the topic
Interaction with a Virtual Coach for Active and Healthy Ageing
International audienceSince life expectancy has increased significantly over the past century, society is being forced to discover innovative ways to support active aging and elderly care. The e-VITA project, which receives funding from both the European Union and Japan, is built on a cutting edge method of virtual coaching that focuses on the key areas of active and healthy aging. The requirements for the virtual coach were ascertained through a process of participatory design in workshops, focus groups, and living laboratories in Germany, France, Italy, and Japan. Several use cases were then chosen for development utilising the open-source Rasa framework. The system uses common representations such as Knowledge Bases and Knowledge Graphs to enable the integration of context, subject expertise, and multimodal data, and is available in English, German, French, Italian, and Japanese
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