Building Human and Robot Teams for Ethical Decision Making in Elder Care Scenarios

Students: Leah Hall, Krittana Phumjam, Jakob Gardner, Reimar Tria

Faculty Mentor: John Sullins III

Philosophy

College of Humanities, Social Sciences, and the Arts

Our project aims to evaluate how to make human and robot teams that can engage in ethical decision-making in elder care scenarios. We use human participants and a series of questionnaires to record the participants' responses. In the study, the participant interacts with a robot and plays a virtual game to make a place setting for an individual with dementia. The participant will interact with one of three different possible robot behaviors. From this, we hope to gather some conclusion on how it is most advantageous and ethical to build human and robot teams in regard to care for dementia patients. The objective of this project is to work with technologies that are available in the SSU Maker Space and/or robotics resources held by the CS department's educational robotics lending lab and apply them to the task of exploring the problems outlined in my research on the use of social robotics in the care of patients suffering from dementia.