Robot Enhanced Therapy for Autistic Children: An Ethical Analysis

The use of social robots has been proposed for the delivery of therapy to autistic children. The aim of such projects, of which the DREAM project is an example, is to replace therapists by robots, operating in sensory environments that enable them to detect and respond to feedback from the child. This article considers the ethical concerns of autonomy, community, transparency, identity, value, and empathy to evaluate the ethics of such deployment of robots. In doing so it provides a response to the Richardson et al. article in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, Mar. 2018 [20]. This article concludes that deployment of robots to control the behavior of autistic children is ethically suspect and should be questioned. The use of robots with children should be evaluated on the basis of the purpose of and process by which such robots are deployed, rather than on the basis of the technology itself. Particularly important is the roboticist's empathy with the user of the robot, and gaining an understanding of the individual child. The paper suggests how an understanding of the autistic child might lead to sensitive deployment of a robot to help the child manage social environments through supporting the child's regulation of emotions.