Distribution of Responsibility During the Usage of AI-Based Exoskeletons for Upper Limb Rehabilitation

TL;DR

This paper examines the ethical distribution of responsibility among users, therapists, and developers in AI-based exoskeletons for upper limb rehabilitation, emphasizing the importance of integrating ethical guidelines into development.

Contribution

It introduces a case study analyzing responsibility distribution and discusses how to embed ethical considerations into AI exoskeleton development processes.

Findings

Identifies technical factors affecting responsibility during rehabilitation

Highlights the importance of ethical guidelines in development

Provides insights for better human-machine interaction

Abstract

The ethical issues concerning the AI-based exoskeletons used in healthcare have already been studied literally rather than technically. How the ethical guidelines can be integrated into the development process has not been widely studied. However, this is one of the most important topics which should be studied more in real-life applications. Therefore, in this paper we highlight one ethical concern in the context of an exoskeleton used to train a user to perform a gesture: during the interaction between the exoskeleton, patient and therapist, how is the responsibility for decision making distributed? Based on the outcome of this, we will discuss how to integrate ethical guidelines into the development process of an AI-based exoskeleton. The discussion is based on a case study: AiBle. The different technical factors affecting the rehabilitation results and the human-machine interaction for AI-based exoskeletons are identified and discussed in this paper in order to better apply the ethical guidelines during the development of AI-based exoskeletons.