Robots Could Act as Ethical Mediators Between Patients and Caregivers

This robot can step in with ethical advice when a relationship gets complicated.

Researchers at Georgia Tech presented a paper on “an intervening ethical governor for a robot mediator in patient-caregiver relationship.” The idea is that robots will become part of our daily lives, and they are much, much better than humans at paying close and careful attention to things, without getting distracted or bored, forever. So robots with an understanding of ethical issues would be able to observe interactions between patients and caregivers, and intervene when they notice that something’s not going the way it should. This is important, and we need it.

In the United States, there are about a million people living with Parkinson’s disease. Robotic systems like exoskeletons and robot companions are starting to help people with physical rehabilitation and emotional support, but it’s going to be a while before we have robots that are capable of giving patients with Parkinson’s all the help that they need.

To test if a robot mediator could help in such cases, the Georgia Tech researchers—Jaeeun Shim, Ronald Arkin, and Michael Pettinati—developed an intervening ethical governor (IEG). It is basically a set of algorithms that encodes specific ethical rules, and determines what to do in different situations. 

Source: http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-intelligence/robots-could-act-as-ethical-mediators-between-patients-and-caregivers?docId=j4bTgF_Vmar2tDyaCmq-3FyYEGg