Designing Robots for Care: Care Centered Value-Sensitive Design

By Aimee van Wynsberghe. 2013

358 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The prospective robots in healthcare intended to be included within the conclave of the nurse-patient relationship—what I refer to as care robots—require 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. What’s 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 future.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Safety Research, Social Psychology

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Citations in the corpus

A Survey of Robots in Healthcare (2021, methodology): “As is discussed by Wynsberghe [13], one cannot define exclusively the characteristics of a Care Robot, as a robot can be named as such only by the way it is used, i.e., for providing or assisting people in the process of patient care.”
AI Ethics in Predictive Policing: From Models of Threat to an Ethics of Care (2019, background): “It is further proposed that in trying to improve the management of a broad variety of governmental, non-profit and commercial organizations with data-driven techniques, AI ethics can also draw upon the Ethics of Care, as robot ethics has done [53].”
Towards Transparency by Design for Artificial Intelligence (2020, background): “…such as Friedman et al.’s (2008) Value-Sensitive Design, and subject-specific variations, such as Aimee van Wynsberghe’s Care-Centred Value Sensitive Design for Health-care Robotics (Van Wynsberghe 2013), have conceptualized approaches to design that aim to realize this insight into practice.”
The Dark (Patterns) Side of UX Design (2018, background): “This is the mode that van Wynsberghe [69] suggests as a path forward, where ethics become embedded in the everyday activities of practitioners through the actions of practitioners-as-everyday-ethicists and professional ethicists with domain expertise.”