IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020 - 51

Robot Enhanced
Therapy for Autistic
Children

An Ethical Analysis
©ISTOCKPHOTO.COM/WILDPIXEL

Neil McBride

T

he 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

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MTS.2020.2967493
Date of current version: 2 March 2020

MARCH 2020

∕

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.

IEEE TECHNOLOGY AND SOCIETY MAGAZINE

0278-0097/20©2020IEEE

51



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IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2020

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