Ethical Frameworks ForTelecare Technologies for

older people at homehttp://www.lancs.ac.uk/efortt/

Funded under the EU FP7Science in Society programme

Explain 3 generations of telecare....

• Community alarms• Sensor based monitoring• Care robots

EFORTT is the only FP7 project

examining ageing and telecare ethics in

practice

What counts as ethics?Principles? Practices?

EFORTT's research shows up an ethical dilemma for policy:

In the context of demographic ageing telecare for older people at home has the potential to be coercive......

Explain....

Why it's important to examine care technology in practice - to move from principle ethics.....to critical empirical

ethics.....

Field notes: a 'telecare review visit'Grace has terrible arthritis and is in constant

pain, her knees are 'terrible' and she has pain in her back, legs arm and shoulder. She has not left her house at all for 12 months. Her doctor 'made her go back on the morphine' even though it 'doesn't agree with me', which she thinks made her have the fall that led to her needing care. She now has pull cords in her rooms, a falls monitor, CO2 monitor and extreme temps.

30/10/10

She seems only to know anything about the (pendant) alarm – the falls monitor is sitting next to her on the shelf, next to the china dogs, pills, little tin pill box and books. She tells us that it goes off if it tilts and says that she’s worried about it going off – she tells the cleaner to be careful. She doesn’t seem to understand it at all. Kate asks her if she wears it; she doesn’t seem to understand. Kate asks her if it has a belt and she says yes. Later I ask her again if she ever wears it – she doesn’t. Kate, (surprisingly) doesn’t try to instruct her about the device or tell her to wear it.

Current policy: ageing in placeRemote systems allow monitoring of specific activities/absence of activity: ‘telecare’Uploading/transmission of e.g. vital signs allows medical monitoring: ‘telemedicine’

Who benefits? Should there be uncritical acceptance that e.g. reducing home visits is a ‘good’? Are other kinds of ‘solutions’to demographic ageing discussed?

Critical policy questions

To address how telecare development can avoid becoming coercive?To determine empirically who is actually seen as the ‘user’. Who is telecare actually for?To examine how actual use occurs and how forms of usage may influence future design (bad users/good users?)

Policy ethics: ongoing questioning what is seen as ‘given’; state provision/distributionResearch ethics: methodology must be inclusive of older people, formal and informal carersDesign ethics: industry engagement -technologies and systems developed collaboratively, rather than appliedPractice ethics: vigilance - review ongoing ethical issues that emerge from observing telecare in use (homes, call centres etc)

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