Research
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Robot use in care activities |
Background
Dementia care is undergoing a major transformation as a consequence of demographic aging and technological developments. New co-intelligent tracking, sensor and assistive technologies have become available to monitor and support the behavior of people with dementia. The aim is to promote independent living, detect or predict impending problems, relieve caregiver burden, and increase the overall quality and cost-efficiency of care. These socio-technical systems are using artificial intelligence, semantics and human interpretations, which is why we call them “co-intelligent”.
Objectives
This project consortium examines ‘co-intelligent sensory dementia care’ (CIMADeC) systems in the everyday life environment of informal as well as institutional care settings. By combining approaches from technology assessment and empirically informed ethics, we investigate social acceptability and moral assessment using qualitative empirical methods. Thereby, we are interested in the following stakeholders from different backgrounds:
- patients
- family caregivers
- professional caregivers
The ethical analysis focuses on two important norms of dementia care:
- privacy and
- empowerment.
Research findings
The project will provide reports, articles and demonstration videos to inform developers in engineering/informatics as well as researchers in the field of ethical, legal and social aspects, stakeholders (e.g., patient organizations) and policy makers how to incorporate ethical and social concerns of users and other stakeholders in technology development and dementia care.
Subproects
The project consists of four scientific subprojects and is supported by the coordination project (SP 5).