By 2030, the Government of Canada predicts that over 9.5 million (23%) Canadians will be 65 years of age or older. For this growing demographic of older adults, intelligent home health technologies have been proposed as one beneficial avenue to support and maintain health and wellness as they begin experiencing ageing-related health effects. However, many ethical concerns have been raised regarding the design and deployment of these technologies in ageing-in-place settings such as long-term care and nursing homes.
This thesis aims to better understand the ethical concerns that long-term care stakeholders have with a subset of intelligent home health technologies known as Ambient Assistive Living (AAL) technology.
To obtain this understanding, a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) was conducted to gather the different ethical concerns that long-term care stakeholders have with AAL technology and to observe the various ethical design and engineering frameworks used to develop AAL technology for aging-in-place settings. 41 publications were analyzed to identify various ethical concerns held by ageing-in-place stakeholders and the different ethical design and engineering frameworks used to address these concerns. The findings from the SLR identified 17 ethical concerns that influenced how the research was conducted with long-term care facility stakeholders.
Following the SLR, a Participatory Design methodology in the form of workshops and interviews was developed and implemented with 30 long-term care facility stakeholders to understand their ethical concerns with two AAL devices: the Hexoskin ProShirtTM - a wearable device used to monitor and collect vital signs, and the AWS DeepLensTM camera - a machine-learning enabled video camera used to make predictions. Through data analysis, 35 topics were identified and grouped into 12 main ethical concerns for both devices.
Once a better understanding of long-term care stakeholders' ethical concerns with the two devices was gained, a prototype of an ethical design tool - the Ethical DataSheet - was proposed. An Ethical DataSheet is meant to support researchers, engineers, designers, and others in developing a better understanding of the ethical concerns they must consider when designing and developing AAL technology for ageing-in-place applications.
To create the Ethical DataSheet prototype, a snowball sampling literature review was conducted. By conducting the second literature review, inspiration from different ethical design tools was used to develop the prototype. The Ethical DataSheet prototype was then used to create Ethical DataSheets for the Hexoskin ProShirt™ and AWS DeepLens™, which present the top ethical concerns that were identified through the workshops and interviews with long-term care facility stakeholders.
The findings of this research will be shared with the PATH research community, who are dedicated to providing nationwide testing and services for home health technologies that will accelerate the availability of appropriate smart systems (i.e. AAL technologies) for seniors' and patients' home healthcare.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:uottawa.ca/oai:ruor.uottawa.ca:10393/44241 |
| Date | 09 November 2022 |
| Creators | Robinson, Katherine-Marie |
| Contributors | Millar, Jason |
| Publisher | Université d'Ottawa / University of Ottawa |
| Source Sets | Université d’Ottawa |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
| Format | application/pdf |
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