Robot Companions for Older People – Ethical Concerns

The proportion of older people in the population is increasing and correspondingly, the need for support in elderly care services. As the relative number of human resources would be diminishing, technological solutions and services need to be explored. However, many ethical concerns arise when exploring these solutions and services, which we have seen in an ongoing research project – multimodal elderly care systems (MECS) – for introducing robot companions for elderly. The ethical concerns focused on in this paper include privacy, security, safety and the potential lack of contact with other humans. This paper will present these issues and discuss possible ways of addressing these concerns.