Interaction Design Patterns for Social Robot Assistance of Moral Decisions in Healthcare

Abstract

The implementation of social robots in the healthcare industry is becoming substantial as a consequence of the scarcity of healthcare professionals, rising costs of healthcare and an increase in the number of vulnerable populations. Social robots will be deployed, in increasing numbers, in assisting health care professionals during the provision of care to patients. While research in Human-Robot-Interaction (HRI) has investigated mechanisms for making decisions taken by artificial agents more ethical, there is limited work done in investigating adaptations to HRI that promotes ethical behaviour on the human-side. Moral dilemmas can appear when decisions have to be made regarding patientcare. Dealing with them can be challenging for healthcare professionals since the impact of decisions affect multiple parties and involves different considerations and value-trade-offs of the involved people. There are different approaches in which healthcare professionals can be confronted with moral dilemmas. Based on decision making principles, a robot might assist the health care professionals in ethical decision making with an appropriate reflection or confrontation of the dilemma. This thesis investigates how a social robot can confront a professional with a moral dilemma and what the associated effects are. Following the Socio-Cognitive Engineering (SCE) method, two alternative proto-patterns are created for dilemma confrontation by a robot in a resuscitation scenario: Verbal and Multi-modal confrontation. In such a scenario, the robot displays protests of distress and affect in order to help the professionals carry out systematic reflection of the moral dilemmas they experience. In an evaluation, it is tested whether these confrontation patterns are being perceived as intended, comparing the two confrontation patterns with a neutral scenario.