Fardeau Erika, Senghor Abdou Simon, Racine Eric
Pragmatic Health Ethics Research Unit, Institut de recherches cliniques de Montréal, 110 Avenue Des Pins Ouest, Montréal, QC H2W 1R7 Canada.
Division of Experimental Medicine, McGill University, Montréal, QC Canada.
Int J Soc Robot. 2023 Apr 20:1-51. doi: 10.1007/s12369-023-00980-8.
Socially assistive robots are being developed and tested to support social interactions and assist with healthcare needs, including in the context of dementia. These technologies bring their share of situations where moral values and principles can be profoundly questioned. Several aspects of these robots affect human relationships and social behavior, i.e., fundamental aspects of human existence and human flourishing. However, the impact of socially assistive robots on human flourishing is not yet well understood in the current state of the literature. We undertook a scoping review to study the literature on human flourishing as it relates to health uses of socially assistive robots. Searches were conducted between March and July 2021 on the following databases: Ovid MEDLINE, PubMed and PsycINFO. Twenty-eight articles were found and analyzed. Results show that no formal evaluation of the impact of socially assistive robots on human flourishing in the context of dementia in any of the articles retained for the literature review although several articles touched on at least one dimension of human flourishing and other related concepts. We submit that participatory methods to evaluate the impact of socially assistive robots on human flourishing could open research to other values at stake, particularly those prioritized by people with dementia which we have less evidence about. Such participatory approaches to human flourishing are congruent with empowerment theory.
社交辅助机器人正在被研发和测试,以支持社交互动并满足医疗保健需求,包括在痴呆症的背景下。这些技术带来了一些情况,在这些情况下,道德价值观和原则可能会受到深刻质疑。这些机器人的几个方面会影响人际关系和社会行为,即人类生存和繁荣的基本方面。然而,在当前的文献状态下,社交辅助机器人对人类繁荣的影响尚未得到充分理解。我们进行了一项范围审查,以研究与社交辅助机器人在健康领域的应用相关的人类繁荣方面的文献。于2021年3月至7月在以下数据库进行了检索:Ovid MEDLINE、PubMed和PsycINFO。共找到并分析了28篇文章。结果表明,在纳入文献综述的任何文章中,均未对社交辅助机器人在痴呆症背景下对人类繁荣的影响进行正式评估,尽管有几篇文章涉及了人类繁荣的至少一个维度和其他相关概念。我们认为,评估社交辅助机器人对人类繁荣影响的参与式方法可以为其他相关价值观的研究打开大门,特别是那些痴呆症患者所优先考虑的价值观,而我们对此了解较少。这种关于人类繁荣的参与式方法与赋权理论是一致的。