There are more and more robots being used in health care. Most of them are prototypes, some – like Lio and P-CARE from F&P Robotics – are products that are manufactured in small series. Machine ethics researches and creates moral machines. These are often guided by certain values or meta-rules, they follow predetermined rules, or they learn from situations and adapt their behavior. Michael Anderson and Susan L. Anderson presented their value-driven eldercare robot at the 2019 Berlin Colloquium by invitation of Oliver Bendel. The CARE-MOMO („MOMO“ stands for „morality module“) is a morality module for a robot in the manner of Lio. The idea is that the robot acquires clearly delimited moral abilities in addition to its usual abilities. The focus is to have it perform an act or speech act with high reliability based on a moral assumption or reasoning, with a clearly identifiable benefit to the caregiver or the care recipient. The initiators want to address a common problem in the nursing and care field. Marc Heimann could be recruited for the project at the School of Business FHNW. The supervisor is Oliver Bendel, who has been working with robots in the healthcare sector for ten years and has built numerous moral machines together with his teams.
Fig.: Another robot of the company (Photo: F&P Robotics)
On July 22, 2021, Prof. Dr. Oliver Bendel, as client, submitted a project to the School of Business FHNW, entitled „CARE-MOMO: A Morality Module for a Care Robot“. There are more and more robots being used in nursing and care. Most of them are prototypes, some – like Lio and P-Care from F&P Robotics – are products that are manufactured in small series. Machine ethics researches and creates moral machines. These are often guided by certain values or meta-rules, they follow predetermined rules, or they learn from situations and adapt their behavior. Michael Anderson and Susan L. Anderson presented their value-driven eldercare robot at the 2019 Berlin Colloquium by invitation of Oliver Bendel. The client and his teams have created 16 concepts and implementations of moral machines and social robots over the past decade. He has been researching systems and robots in the healthcare sector for just as long. The CARE-MOMO is a morality module for a robot in the manner of Lio. The idea is that the robot acquires clearly delimited moral abilities in addition to its usual abilities. The focus is to have it perform an act or speech act with high reliability based on a moral assumption or reasoning, with a clearly identifiable benefit to the caregiver or the care recipient. The result is a morality module that can in principle be used by a robot like Lio. In August 2021, it will be decided whether the project can be implemented in this form.
Fig.: Michael Anderson at 2019 Berlin Colloquium (photo: Daimler and Benz Foundation)
DIH-HERO is a project in the healthcare sector supported by the European Union since January 2019. According to the website, the mission is to create a sustaining network that connects players in the healthcare sector and to support small and medium sized enterprises. „Currently, Europe and countries all over the world are facing a global pandemic. Together with its extensive Robotics in Healthcare European network DIH-HERO decided to support the fight against COVID-19 by providing €1,000,000 for robotic technologies that can be deployed timely, in order to support healthcare professionals and save lives by satisfying a current clinical demand or need.“ (Website DIH-HERO) F&P Robotics based in Switzerland is one of the winners of the announcement. Lio – one of the company’s flagships – will now learn new tasks in the field of disinfection (door traps, lift buttons). The normal use of the care robot was last described in a paper by Oliver Bendel (School of Business FHNW), Alina Gasser and Joel Siebenmann (F&P Robotics) that was accepted at the AAAI 2020 Spring Symposia. Because of COVID-19 the lecture was postponed to late autumn.
Kooperations- und Kollaborationsroboter, kurz Co-Robots oder Cobots, sind aus den Fabriken nicht mehr wegzudenken. So arbeiten sie etwa im Automobilbereich eng mit den Monteuren zusammen, und jeder macht das, was er am besten kann. Die neuartigen Roboter sind jedoch nicht nur in Produktion und Logistik relevant, sondern auch im Servicebereich, insbesondere dort, wo eine Nähe zwischen ihnen und den Benutzern erwünscht oder nicht zu vermeiden ist. In der Pflege hat man jahrzehntelang Einzellösungen ganz unterschiedlicher Art entwickelt. Nun setzt man mehr und mehr auf Co-Robots und bringt ihnen die speziellen Arbeiten bei, die in Pflege, Betreuung oder Therapie anfallen. Der Beitrag „Co-Robots as Care Robots“ von Oliver Bendel, Alina Gasser und Joel Siebenmann stellt die Vorteile, aber ebenso die Nachteile von Co-Robots in Pflege und Betreuung dar und gibt Hinweise mit Blick auf Mensch-Roboter-Interaktion und -Kommunikation. Er geht dabei von einem Modell aus, das testweise bereits in verschiedenen Pflegeeinrichtungen und Altenheimen eingesetzt wurde, nämlich Lio von F&P Robotics, und nutzt Ergebnisse aus begleitenden Studien. Es kann gezeigt werden, dass Co-Robots in vielerlei Hinsicht ideal für Anforderungen in Pflege und Betreuung sind. Es gilt freilich auch, einige Punkte zu beachten, damit Funktionalität und Akzeptanz gewährleistet sind. Der Beitrag wurde beim AAAI 2020 Spring Symposium „Applied AI in Healthcare: Safety, Community, and the Environment“ angenommen. An der Stanford University trifft man jedes Jahr die weltweit führenden Experten in Künstlicher Intelligenz, Robotik und Ethik. Da die Konferenz wegen COVID-19 abgesagt werden musste, findet der Vortrag im November im Rahmen der AAAI 2020 Fall Symposia in Washington statt. Das Paper kann über arxiv.org/abs/2004.04374 heruntergeladen werden.
Robots in the health sector are important, valuable innovations and supplements. As therapy and nursing robots, they take care of us and come close to us. In addition, other service robots are widespread in nursing and retirement homes and hospitals. With the help of their sensors, all of them are able to recognize us, to examine and classify us, and to evaluate our behavior and appearance. Some of these robots will pass on our personal data to humans and machines. They invade our privacy and challenge the informational autonomy. This is a problem for the institutions and the people that needs to be solved. The article “The Spy who Loved and Nursed Me: Robots and AI Systems in Healthcare from the Perspective of Information Ethics” by Oliver Bendel presents robot types in the health sector, along with their technical possibilities, including their sensors and their artificial intelligence capabilities. Against this background, moral problems are discussed, especially from the perspective of information ethics and with respect to privacy and informational autonomy. One of the results shows that such robots can improve the personal autonomy, but the informational autonomy is endangered in an area where privacy has a special importance. At the end, solutions are proposed from various disciplines and perspectives. The article was published in Telepolis on December 17, 2018 and can be accessed via www.heise.de/tp/features/The-Spy-who-Loved-and-Nursed-Me-4251919.html.
