Ethical framework of assistive devices: review and reflection

Abstract

The population of ageing is growing significantly over the world, and there is an emerging demand for better healthcare services and more care centres. Innovations of Information and Communication Technology has resulted in development of various types of assistive robots to fulfil elderly's needs and independency, whilst carrying out daily routine tasks. This makes it vital to have a clear understanding of elderly's needs and expectations from assis-tive robots. This paper addresses current ethical issues to understand elderly's prime needs. Also, we consider other general ethics with the purpose of applying these theories to form a proper ethics framework. In the ethics framework , the ethical concerns of senior citizens will be prioritized to satisfy elderly's needs and also to diminish related expenses to healthcare services. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.