Robotica medica e societa'

La robotica medica è un campo d’indagine multidisciplinare che richiede la convergenza di competenze specifiche di robotica, medicina e informatica, sia nella fase di individuazione delle funzionalità richieste sia nelle varie fasi in cui si articola il processo di progettazione, sviluppo e valutazione dei sistemi robotici. In tutte queste fasi, insieme alle problematiche di carattere scientifico e tecnico, bisogna affrontare rilevanti questioni di carattere etico, politico ed economico, che spaziano dai temi del consenso informato e dell’attribuzione di responsabilità morale e oggettiva ai temi dell’equità e della giustizia distributiva nell’assegnazione di risorse tecnologiche avanzate per la sanità. Pertanto, la descrizione di applicazioni significative nei vari settori della robotica medica sarà accompagnata nei paragrafi seguenti da considerazioni sui vantaggi attesi e sulle motivazioni soggiacenti, sulle sfide scientifiche e tecnologiche che attendono i ricercatori e sui problemi di carattere etico, politico ed economico che richiedono l’elaborazione di soluzioni partecipate e condivise

Ethical reflections on healthcare robotics

The rapid developments of robotics technologies in the last twenty years of the XX century have greatly encouraged research on the use of robots for surgery, diagnosis, rehabilitation, prosthetics, and assistance to disabled and elderly people. This chapter provides an overview of robotic technologies and systems for health care, focussing on various ethical problems that these technologies give rise tothese problems notably concern the protection of human physical and mental integrity, autonomy, responsibility, and fair access to medical resources

Human-robot interaction as a make-believe play|L’INTERAZIONE TRA UMANI E ROBOT COME GIOCO DI FINZIONE

An issue that is usually neglected in the literature on the attribution of mental states in human-robot interaction is the ontological commitment of users to these states. In this context, we argue the need to decouple the concept of attributing mental states from the act of uttering sentences with mentalistic content. We will perform an analysis of the different types of ontological commitment underlying the user’s utterance of a sentence with mentalistic content, in order to highlight the importance of estimating the user’s belief set for understanding the psychological dynamics of human-robot interaction. The different attitudes range from realism to eliminativism or the agnostic view, within which two positions can be distinguished: the reductionist position, which traces mentalistic statements back to beliefs about the physical state of the system, and the fictional position, according to which the user’s beliefs are true in the context of a make-believe play. In relation to the latter position, we consider a recent proposal by Clark and Fischer (2022), the so-called ‘depiction theory’, which was created to solve the social artefact puzzle, whereby, during human-robot interaction, users interact with the robot as if it were a real social agent, even though they are aware of its artefact nature. By reading the robot as a superimposition of several scenes, including the raw artefact and the depicted character, the theory not only explains the aforementioned paradox, but also presents itself as a fictional interpretation of human-robot interaction, since in this framework beliefs about the robot’s mind can be interpreted as beliefs about the depicted character’s mind. Nevertheless, other ontological attitudes can explain the social artefact puzzle, and future work is needed to determine user’s beliefs about robots’ beliefs from experimental data

Machine Experiments and Theoretical Modelling: from Cybernetic Methodology to Neuro-Robotics

Cybernetics promoted machine-supported investigations of adaptive sensorimotor behaviours observed in biological systems. This methodological approach receives renewed attention in contemporary robotics, cognitive ethology, and the cognitive neurosciences. Its distinctive features concern machine experiments, and their role in testing behavioural models and explanations flowing from them. Cybernetic explanations of behavioural events, regularities, and capacities rely on multiply realizable mechanism schemata, and strike a sensible balance between causal and unifying constraints. The multiple realizability of cybernetic mechanism schemata paves the way to principled comparisons between biological systems and machines. Various methodological issues involved in the transition from mechanism schemata to their machine instantiations are addressed here, by reference to a simple sensorimotor coordination task. These concern the proper treatment of ceteris paribus clauses in experimental settings, the significance of running experiments with correct but incomplete machine instantiations of mechanism schemata, and the advantage of operating with real machines – as opposed to simulated ones – immersed in real environments

Biorobotic Experiments for the Discovery of Biological Mechanisms

Robots are being extensively used for the purpose of discovering and testing empirical hypotheses about biological sensorimotor mechanisms. We examine here methodological problems that have to be addressed in order to design and perform “good” experiments with these machine models. These problems notably concern the mapping of biological mechanism descriptions into robotic mechanism descriptions; the distinction between theoretically unconstrained “implementation details” and robotic features that carry a modeling weight; the role of preliminary calibration experiments; the monitoring of experimental environments for disturbing factors that affect both modeling features and theoretically unconstrained implementation details of robots. Various assumptions that are gradually introduced in the process of setting up and performing these robotic experiments become integral parts of the background hypotheses that are needed to bring experimental observations to bear on biological mechanism descriptions