On Healthcare Robots: Concepts, definitions, and considerations for healthcare robot governance

Although healthcare is a remarkably sensitive domain of application, and systems that exert direct control over the world can cause harm in a way that humans cannot necessarily correct or oversee, it is still unclear whether and how healthcare robots are currently regulated or should be regulated. Existing regulations are primarily unprepared to provide guidance for such a rapidly evolving field and accommodate devices that rely on machine learning and AI. Moreover, the field of healthcare robotics is very rich and extensive, but it is still very much scattered and unclear in terms of definitions, medical and technical classifications, product characteristics, purpose, and intended use. As a result, these devices often navigate between the medical device regulation or other non-medical norms, such as the ISO personal care standard. Before regulating the field of healthcare robots, it is therefore essential to map the major state-of-the-art developments in healthcare robotics, their capabilities and applications, and the challenges we face as a result of their integration within the healthcare environment. This contribution fills in this gap and lack of clarity currently experienced within healthcare robotics and its governance by providing a structured overview of and further elaboration on the main categories now established, their intended purpose, use, and main characteristics. We explicitly focus on surgical, assistive, and service robots to rightfully match the definition of healthcare as the organized provision of medical care to individuals, including efforts to maintain, treat, or restore physical, mental, or emotional well-being. We complement these findings with policy recommendations to help policymakers unravel an optimal regulatory framing for healthcare robot technologies

Proceedings of the Workshop on Social Robots in Therapy: Focusing on Autonomy and Ethical Challenges

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in HRI research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users both social and emotional dimensions. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of these projects have the overall ambitious goal to increase the well-being of a vulnerable population. Typical work in RAT is performed using remote controlled robots; a technique called Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ). The robot is usually controlled, unbeknownst to the patient, by a human operator. However, WoZ has been demonstrated to not be a sustainable technique in the long-term. Providing the robots with autonomy (while remaining under the supervision of the therapist) has the potential to lighten the therapists burden, not only in the therapeutic session itself but also in longer-term diagnostic tasks. Therefore, there is a need for exploring several degrees of autonomy in social robots used in therapy. Increasing the autonomy of robots might also bring about a new set of challenges. In particular, there will be a need to answer new ethical questions regarding the use of robots with a vulnerable population, as well as a need to ensure ethically-compliant robot behaviours. Therefore, in this workshop we want to gather findings and explore which degree of autonomy might help to improve health-care interventions and how we can overcome the ethical challenges inherent to it.