State of the art on ethical, legal, and social issues linked to audio- and video-based AAL solutions

Alin Ake-Kob, Aurelija Blazeviciene, Liane Colonna, Anto Cartolovni, Carina Dantas, Anton Fedosov, Francisco Florez-Revuelta, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga, Zhicheng He, Andrzej Klimczuk (), Maksymilian Kuźmicz, Adrienn Lukács, Christoph Lutz, Renata Mekovec, Cristina Miguel, Emilio Mordini, Zada Pajalic, Barbara Krystyna Pierscionek, Maria Jose Santofimia Romero, Albert Ali Salah, Andrzej Sobecki, Agusti Solanas and Aurelia Tamò-Larrieux

EconStor Research Reports from ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics

Abstract: Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap between high-income countries (HIC) and low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things (IoT) devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private (e.g., the home). The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI). A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage.

Keywords: Ethical principles; Privacy; Assistive Living Technologies; Privacy by Design; General Data Protection Regulation; housing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D19 M14 O18 O33 R58 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-big and nep-ict
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:esrepo:248470

DOI: 10.13140/RG.2.2.28785.81764

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