Towards Measuring Ethicality of an Intelligent Assistive System
This addresses ethical challenges for stakeholders using assistive systems, but it is incremental as it builds on existing simulation tools and focuses on a specific domain.
The authors tackled the problem of measuring ethical adherence in intelligent assistive systems by developing a method using a simulation tool to analyze assistive strategies for Persons with Dementia in indoor environments against ethical regulations like autonomy, justice, and beneficence.
Artificial intelligence (AI) based assistive systems, so called intelligent assistive technology (IAT) are becoming increasingly ubiquitous by each day. IAT helps people in improving their quality of life by providing intelligent assistance based on the provided data. A few examples of such IATs include self-driving cars, robot assistants and smart-health management solutions. However, the presence of such autonomous entities poses ethical challenges concerning the stakeholders involved in using these systems. There is a lack of research when it comes to analysing how such IAT adheres to provided ethical regulations due to ethical, logistic and cost issues associated with such an analysis. In the light of the above-mentioned problem statement and issues, we present a method to measure the ethicality of an assistive system. To perform this task, we utilised our simulation tool that focuses on modelling navigation and assistance of Persons with Dementia (PwD) in indoor environments. By utilising this tool, we analyse how well different assistive strategies adhere to provided ethical regulations such as autonomy, justice and beneficence of the stakeholders.