An Ethical Framework for the Design, Development, Implementation, and Assessment of Drones Used in Public Healthcare

An Ethical Framework for the Design, Development, Implementation, and Assessment of Drones Used in Public Healthcare

Cawthorne, C.D. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology; University of Southern Denmark)
Robbins-van Wynsberghe, A.L. (TU Delft Ethics & Philosophy of Technology)

2020

The use of drones in public healthcare is suggested as a means to improve efficiency under constrained resources and personnel. This paper begins by framing drones in healthcare as a social experiment where ethical guidelines are needed to protect those impacted while fully realizing the benefits the technology offers. Then we propose an ethical framework to facilitate the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones used in public healthcare. Given the healthcare context, we structure the framework according to the four bioethics principles: beneficence, non-maleficence, autonomy, and justice, plus a fifth principle from artificial intelligence ethics: explicability. These principles are abstract which makes operationalization a challenge; therefore, we suggest an approach of translation according to a values hierarchy whereby the top-level ethical principles are translated into relevant human values within the domain. The resulting framework is an applied ethics tool that facilitates awareness of relevant ethical issues during the design, development, implementation, and assessment of drones in public healthcare.

Applied ethics
Drones
Public healthcare
Robot ethics
Value-sensitive design (VSD)
Values hierarchy

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:72f4a301-c736-475c-aa88-98c5d7a75906

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-020-00233-1

1353-3452

Science & Engineering Ethics, 26 (5), 2867-2891

Institutional Repository

journal article

© 2020 C.D. Cawthorne, A.L. Robbins-van Wynsberghe