Robot-Care for the Older People: Ethically Justified or Not?

Abstract

With the growing popularity of robotics technology, robots have also been introduced to take care of older people. Robots can assist seniors in their daily life tasks, monitor their health or provide them companionship. Despite the benefits of robots, several ethical concerns arise in elderly-robot interaction. The old people might get lonely due to less human interaction, or they feel less control in their lives. The elderly might lose their personal liberty. In this paper, we try to highlight the ethical concerns and provide some preliminary suggestions which would be helpful to reduce the ethical concerns by using customized systems with proper guidelines and consultation with older people.