Responsibility for Assisted Living Technologies

Abstract

The approach to innovations known as Responsible research and innovation (RRI) aims to move the innovation system towards creating products that strive to realize social values along with economic benefits. This paper discusses the systematic assessment of assistive technologies in order for them to meet the aims expressed in RRI. A central issue in the discussion is how to facilitate an integration of insights from the discourse on RRI with more established assessment approaches such as Health Technology Assessment (HTA). Based on the literature on existing socio-ethical assessment tools, I investigate how these tools can be combined with HTA and how they can add perspectives from RRI that might increase the socio-ethical value of assistive technologies. Through a discussion on how to understand RRI, HTA, assessment and integration, I suggest a list of four possible approaches that have the potential to be applied as assessment approaches that integrate insights from RRI and HTA. These are then evaluated on their ability to address issues that have emerged from a literature review on RRI and assistive technologies, on empirical studies in this technology field and on their product focus. In conclusion, I argue that the Ethical Impact Assessment, the Socratic approach, the Ethical Matrix, and the HTA Core Model seem to be the most promising methodologies, but that these need adjustments to cover substantive themes from RRI.
 Keywords: energy scenarios, justice, future generations, capabilities approach

Stakeholders’ Views on Responsible Assessments of Assistive Technologies through an Ethical HTA Matrix

“…A brief summary of the main areas of concerns and that any assessment should address are the good life, risks and benefits in use; risks and benefits before use; the distribution of risks and benefits; and the distribution of responsibilities and training, in addition to opening up on the changing nature of future impacts of assistive technologies. These findings informed a survey and evaluation of different assessment methodologies for new and emerging technologies [17]. A central theme here was further the applicability of the methodologies in the health domain and more specifically on assistive technologies.…”

“…In this article, I introduce and discuss the concept of responsible assessments based on recent work in RRI and assessment methodology of new and emerging health technologies [14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21] before presenting a methodology, which is a combination of the Socratic approach to ethical analysis of health technologies and the Ethical Matrix [22][23][24][25]. I apply this methodology, the Ethical HTA Matrix, on an assistive technology currently on the market in several towns and municipalities in Norway and with increasing use, and present the results from the analysis to decision-makers in assistive technologies.…”

“…were primarily selected to address a wide range of concerns that an RRI assessment should include for assistive technologies [17], and in addition they have been widely used to analyze ethical and social impacts of novel technologies [10,14,19,21,22,24,26,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50]. The reason for combining these two is that the Ethical Matrix can best be characterized as a general-purpose tool for practicing applied ethics, whereas the Socratic approach is highly specified towards the health field.…”