Social Robots in Therapy: Focusing on Autonomy and Ethical Challenges.

Robot-Assisted Therapy (RAT) has successfully been used in Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) research by including social robots in health-care interventions by virtue of their ability to engage human users in both social and emotional dimensions. Research projects on this topic exist all over the globe in the USA, Europe, and Asia. All of these projects have the overall ambitious goal of increasing the well-being of a vulnerable population. Typical, RAT is performed with the Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) technique, where the robot is controlled, unbeknownst to the patient, by a human operator. However, WoZ has been demonstrated to not be a sustainable technique in the long-term. Providing the robots with autonomy (while remaining under the supervision of the therapist) has the potential to lighten the therapist»s burden, not only in the therapeutic session itself but also in longer-term diagnostic tasks. Therefore, there is a need for exploring several degrees of autonomy in social robots used in therapy. Increasing the autonomy of robots might also bring about a new set of challenges. In particular, there will be a need to answer new ethical questions regarding the use of robots with a vulnerable population, as well as a need to ensure ethically-compliant robot behaviors. Therefore, in this workshop we want to gather findings and explore which degree of autonomy might help to improve health-care interventions and how we can overcome the ethical challenges inherent to it.