Machine Medical Ethics

In medical settings, machines are in close proximity with human beings: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. Machines in these contexts are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? The essays in this collection by researchers from both humanities and science describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine, what design features are necessary in order to achieve this, philosophical and practical questions concerning justice, rights, decision-making and responsibility, and accurately modeling essential physician-machine-patient relationships. This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns

Robots That Stimulate Autonomy

Part 6: RoboticsInternational audienceIn healthcare, robots are increasingly being used to provide a high standard of care in the near future. When machines interact with humans, we need to ensure that these machines take into account patient autonomy. Autonomy can be defined as negative autonomy and positive autonomy. We present a moral reasoning system that takes into account this twofold approach of autonomy. In simulation experiments, the system matches the decision of the judge in a number of law cases about medical ethical decisions. This may be useful in applications where robots need to constrain the negative autonomy of a person to stimulate positive autonomy, for example when attempting to pursue a patient to make a healthier choice

Machine medical ethics

The essays in this book, written by researchers from both humanities and sciences, describe various theoretical and experimental approaches to adding medical ethics to a machine in medical settings. Medical machines are in close proximity with human beings, and getting closer: with patients who are in vulnerable states of health, who have disabilities of various kinds, with the very young or very old, and with medical professionals. In such contexts, machines are undertaking important medical tasks that require emotional sensitivity, knowledge of medical codes, human dignity, and privacy. As machine technology advances, ethical concerns become more urgent: should medical machines be programmed to follow a code of medical ethics? What theory or theories should constrain medical machine conduct? What design features are required? Should machines share responsibility with humans for the ethical consequences of medical actions? How ought clinical relationships involving machines to be modeled? Is a capacity for empathy and emotion detection necessary? What about consciousness? This collection is the first book to address these 21st-century concerns

A Dynamical System Modelling Approach to Gross´ Model of Emotion Regulation

Emotions were historically seen as neural activation states without a function. However, recent research provides evidence that emotions are functional (e.g., [4]). Emotions have a facilitating function in decision making, prepare a person for rapid motor responses, and provide information regarding the ongoing match between organism and environment. Emotions also have a social function. They provide us information about others ’ behavioural intentions, and script our social behaviour [5]. In the past two decades, psychological research has started to focus more on emotion regulation (e.g., [5, 6, 9, 11]). In brief, emotion regulation is the process humans undertake in order to affect their emotional response. Recent neurological findings (such as bidirectional links between limbic centers, which generate emotion, and cortical centers, which regulate emotion) have changed the consensus that emotion regulation is a simple, top-down controlled process [5]. This article introduces a computational model to simulate emotion regulation, based on the process model described informally by Gross [5, 6]. Such a model can be used for different purposes. In the first place, from a Cognitive Science perspective, it can provide insight in the process of emotion regulation. This may be useful for the purpose of developing therapies for persons that have difficulties in regulating their emotions [3], for example, in work with forensic inpatients. In addition, a model for emotio