A user-centered ethical assessment of welfare technology for elderly

Abstract

Welfare technology (WT) is often developed with a technical perspective, and little consideration is taken regarding the involvement of important ethical considerations and different values that come up during the development and implementation of WT. Safety, security and privacy are significant, as well as the usability and overall benefit of the tool, but to date assessments often lack a holistic picture of the WT as seen by the users. This paper suggests a user-centered ethical assessment (UCEA) framework for WT to be able to evaluate ethical consequences as a part of the user-centered aspects. Building on established methodologies from research on ethical considerations, as well as the research domain of human-computer interaction, this assessment framework joins knowledge of ethical consequences with aspects affecting the “digitalization with the individual in the center”, e.g. privacy, safety, well-being, dignity, empowerment and usability. The framework was applied during development of an interface for providing symptom information to Parkinson patients. The results showed that the UCEA framework directs the attention to values emphasized by the patients. Thus, functionality of the system was evaluated in the light of values and expected results of the patients, thereby facilitating follow-up of a user-centered assessment. The framework may be further developed and tested, but in this study it served as a working tool for assessing ethical consequences of WT as a part of user-centered aspects.