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Care, Monitoring, and Companionship: Views on Care Robots from Older People and Their Carers

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Abstract

This paper is a discussion of some of the ethical issues relevant to the use of social robots to care for older people in their homes, drawing on qualitative data collected as part of the Acceptable robotiCs COMPanions for AgeiNg Years project. We consider some of the tensions that can be created between older people, their formal (professional) carers, and their informal carers (for example friends or relatives), when a care robot is introduced into the home of an older person. As examples of these tensions, we discuss the use of the care robot as a monitor of older people and carers, for example to ensure older people’s compliance with healthcare regimes, or to police the behaviour of carers to ensure that they are complying with professional guidelines. We also consider the use of care robots in a companionship role for older people, and describe the importance of clearly-delineated roles for care robots. The paper concludes that older people’s autonomy can be limited in the short term in order to protect their longer-term autonomy, and that even if care robots should primarily be considered as being for healthcare rather than for companionship, they might still be used sensitively so that their interference with the companionship role is minimised.

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Notes

  1. It might be argued that giving an older person an alcoholic drink that will harm their health does not really count as assisting them, even if it is consistent with their desires. Whether we conceive of “assistance” as being interest-based or desire-based, it remains the case that assisting an older person may conflict with assisting their carer(s). For simplicity’s sake, this paper will use “interests” broadly, to refer to both the satisfaction of desires or preferences, and benefit that may be independent of desires (such as pleasure), therefore ignoring the fact that desires and interests are distinct and can diverge and conflict (as is widely recognised in the relevant philosophical literature [14–19]). For our purposes here it is sufficient to say that furthering an older person’s desires or interests may conflict with the desires and/or interests of their carers. For a discussion of conflicts between older people’s desires and their interests in the context of care robots, see Sorell and Draper [4].

  2. Quotations will follow this format: the site name is reported first, then the focus group, and finally the individual participant code. This is with the exception of quotations with multiple speakers, in which case participants will be identified as they speak.

  3. The use of this word is not intended to suggest that carers view the task of caring as burdensome, or that they do not wish to undertake it. Rather, it serves as a convenient term to describe a task for which responsibility must be divided up. This terminology tracks that used by Vallor [23], and her discussion indicates that she is similarly cautious about the use of this term.

  4. Sorell and Draper [29] dispute this understanding of monitoring, however.

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Acknowledgments

The work in this paper was partially funded by the European project ACCOMPANY (Acceptable robotiCs COMPanions for AgeiNg Years). Grant Agreement No.: 287624. We are grateful to the ACCOMPANY partners: the University of Warwick, ZUYD, UH, MADoPA, particularly Sandra Bedaf, Tom Sorell, Dag Sverre Syrdal, Carolina Gutierrez-Ruiz, Hagen Lehmann, Kerstin Dautenhahn, Gert-Jan Gelderblom, Hervé Michel, and Helena Lee, each of whom helped with data collection and the initial analysis of the data. Thanks also to each of our study participants.

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  1. 90 Vincent Drive, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, B15 2TT, UK

    Simon Jenkins & Heather Draper

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  1. Simon Jenkins
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  2. Heather Draper
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Correspondence to Heather Draper.

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Informed consent was obtained from the study participants where appropriate.

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Jenkins, S., Draper, H. Care, Monitoring, and Companionship: Views on Care Robots from Older People and Their Carers. Int J of Soc Robotics 7, 673–683 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-015-0322-y

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