Search

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap between high-income countries (HIC) and low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things (IoT) devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private (e.g., the home). The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI). A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage.

To outline the emerging landscape of sharing economy services in Switzerland, this report synthesizes prior market research and technology assessment studies on collaborative consumption and its role in the Swiss workforce. It offers a bird's-eye view of key stakeholders in contemporary Swiss sharing economy services, as well as the models and tools adopted by these services. It also provides several examples of local sharing economy initiatives and identifies emergent issues in this space. The report concludes with suggestions for further reading and research inquiries. &nbsp

Many non-profit resource sharing organizations and collectives (e.g., libraries of things) and local peer-to-peer exchange initiatives leverage underutilized personal resources, such as household tools, to optimize their use. These local sharing initiatives and arrangements often suffer from challenges of continued participation, visibility of members’ interactions as well as interpersonal trust among the membership, which prevent their sustainable development. In prior work, we engaged in a field study of Pumpipumpe, a local resource sharing community in Switzerland to identify members’ needs and requirements to support sharing practices among neighbors. Following insights from this study, we conducted a generative participatory workshop with six community members and design and sustainability experts to approach these emergent challenges. We present the design artifacts that we have developed for the co-creation workshop as well as three design alternatives that our participants conceptualized to address issues of visibility of social interactions and trust among neighbors.

Ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies are increasingly presented and sold as essential smart additions to daily life and home environments that will radically transform the healthcare and wellness markets of the future. An ethical approach and a thorough understanding of all ethics in surveillance/monitoring architectures are therefore pressing. AAL poses many ethical challenges raising questions that will affect immediate acceptance and long-term usage. Furthermore, ethical issues emerge from social inequalities and their potential exacerbation by AAL, accentuating the existing access gap between high-income countries (HIC) and low and middle-income countries (LMIC). Legal aspects mainly refer to the adherence to existing legal frameworks and cover issues related to product safety, data protection, cybersecurity, intellectual property, and access to data by public, private, and government bodies. Successful privacy-friendly AAL applications are needed, as the pressure to bring Internet of Things (IoT) devices and ones equipped with artificial intelligence (AI) quickly to market cannot overlook the fact that the environments in which AAL will operate are mostly private (e.g., the home). The social issues focus on the impact of AAL technologies before and after their adoption. Future AAL technologies need to consider all aspects of equality such as gender, race, age and social disadvantages and avoid increasing loneliness and isolation among, e.g. older and frail people. Finally, the current power asymmetries between the target and general populations should not be underestimated nor should the discrepant needs and motivations of the target group and those developing and deploying AAL systems. Whilst AAL technologies provide promising solutions for the health and social care challenges, they are not exempt from ethical, legal and social issues (ELSI). A set of ELSI guidelines is needed to integrate these factors at the research and development stage.

Mobile devices with health-related apps hold the potential for increasing the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. Two years of the COVID-19 pandemic have put additional stress on already struggling healthcare systems around the world, representing an opportunity for digital tools and e-health solutions to step in. This paper analyses acceptability of three mobile health solutions in Croatia and its relationship with public trust. Each of the apps, Health Portal, Stop COVID-19 and CovidGO, had their own paths to the users, paved by provided information, promotion existence and dynamics, as well as the impact of public actions, such as media appearances of authority figures mentioning the apps. Health Portal and Stop COVID-19 apps gained momentum as well as the national uptake of EU digital COVID certificates, for which CovidGO app was instrumental. Needing to use one app, users realized there are other m-health apps published by the Ministry of Health at the global app stores, which many chose to download as well. This demonstrates a certain level of citizens’ trust to the offered solutions.