Position paper on ethical, legal and social challenges linked to audio- and video-based AAL solutions

Cost Action 19121: GoodBrother

The European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST) is a funding organisation for the creation of research networks, called COST Actions (CA). These networks offer an open space for collaboration among scientists across Europe (and beyond) and thereby give impetus to research advancements and innovation. Many institutions around Europe participate actively in the CA19121 - Network on Privacy-Aware Audio- and Video-Based Applications for Active and Assisted Living, also called GoodBrother.

Europe faces crucial challenges regarding health and social care due to the demographic change and current economic context. Active Assisted Living (AAL) technologies are a possible solution to support tackling them. AAL technologies aim at improving the health, quality of life, and wellbeing of older, impaired, and frail people. AAL systems use different sensors to monitor the environment and its dwellers. Cameras and microphones are being more frequently used for AAL. They monitor an environment and gather information, being the most straightforward and natural way of describing events, persons, objects, actions, and interactions. Recent advances have given these devices the ability to ‘see’ and ‘hear.’ However, their use can be seen as intrusive by some end-users such as assisted persons and professional and informal caregivers.

GoodBrother aims to increase the awareness of the ethical, legal, and privacy issues associated with audio- and video-based monitoring and to propose privacy-aware working solutions for assisted living by creating an interdisciplinary community of researchers and industrial partners from different fields (computing, engineering, healthcare, law, sociology) and other stakeholders (users, policymakers, public services), stimulating new research and innovation. GoodBrother will offset the “Big Brother” sense of continuous monitoring by increasing user acceptance, exploiting these new solutions, and improving market reach.

Working Group 1 on Social Responsibility: Ethical, legal, social, data protection and privacy issues

Experts from diverse disciplines are analysing the ethical, legal, data protection and privacy issues associated with the use of cameras and microphones in private spaces, and how to manage multi-party privacy preferences. They also study the differences according to gender and cultural/societal background in the perception of these issues. This WG aims to establish the core requirements that AAL solutions must fulfil to consider ethico-legal issues and to integrate privacy by design and by default. Those requirements will set up the guidelines for the technical WGs (WG2, WG3 and WG4).

The Workgroup goals are:

• Review the current European and international legislation and the ethical issues that underpin this on the use of audio- and video-based monitoring in private environments.
• Study the differences in the perception of privacy depending on the culture, society, gender and age of the users, and analyse the situations and conditions in later life, i.e. occurrence of a fall, which may affect that perception.
• Investigate the potential benefits and barriers of AAL technology adoption for people in need of care.
• Support the development of privacy-aware monitoring systems by a continuous exchange of knowledge with technological participants in the Action.
• Promote the consideration of ethical, legal, privacy and gender matters in the design of AAL solutions. Inform other WGs on the ethico-legal requirements in the design and development of AAL solutions.

About this Position Paper

In this position paper, we have used Alan Cooper’s persona technique to illustrate the utility of audio- and video-based AAL technologies. Therefore, two primary examples of potential audio- and video-based AAL users, Anna and Irakli, serve as reference points for describing salient ethical, legal and social challenges related to use of AAL.

These challenges are presented on three levels: individual, societal, and regulatory. For each challenge, a set of policy recommendations is suggested.