105tAking CAre oF our PArents
3.3.2 General Ethical Issues Relating to Care Robots
e ethical issues we already have discussed in relation to domotics
(see Section 3.2.2) are also applicable to care robots: privacy, human
contact, quality of life, and the competence of caregivers and care
recipients. For example, most care robots will collect data, since they
will monitor the care recipient, which might infringe the right to pri-
vacy, and working with a lifting robot, such as RIBA II, requires
specic skills of caregivers: knowing how to steer the robot and pre-
dicting potential failures. Here, we discuss three other ethical issues
that are at stake for care robots in general: their safe use, design, and
physical appearance.
3.3.2.1 Safety We are not far from the time when people will live
and interact with care robots and, thus, safety will become funda-
mental. Robot designers should produce safe products for humans
no matter what failure, malfunction, or mishandling may occur.
Because care robots will need to work around people and to touch
them, errors or faults in these robots could result in serious or even
fatal accidents. Conventional safety strategies for industrial robots
cannot be applied to social robots, and especially not to care robots.
A lot of research has been done in this area (see, e.g., Ikuta &
Nokata, 2003; Mukai, Hirano, Nakashima, Sakaida, & Guo, 2011;
CompanionAble Project). Up to 2014, there were no internation-
ally recognized safety regulations or guidelines. As a consequence,
companies have been reluctant to take the risk of investing in and
launching a new robot product in case something goes wrong and
development of the mutual care concept: building a relation-
ship between the human and the robot in which both take care
of each other. is is similar to how a person learns what an
animal understands and can do, so it is like building a bond
with a pet. e main task of the robot is fall prevention and fall
detection. To achieve this, the robot will clear the oor of all
objects and thus reduce the risk of falling. It will detect emer-
gency situations so that help can be called in time. e purpose
of the mutual care approach is to increase the acceptance of the
home robot.