Design of a Robotic Therapy Companion from a Value-Sensitive and Technical Perspective

The nursing sector is facing a profound shortage of skilled workers. Social robots have the potential to relieve the nursing staff. However, given that social interaction is indispensable in the nursing sector, it is essential to equip social robots with comprehensive artificial social interaction capabilities to support the staff effectively. Human values are an essential building block of social interactions and drive individual’s behaviors. Therefore, human values need to be reflected in human-robot interaction. In this conceptual paper, we present a value-sensitive approach to the use case of a humanoid social robot in elderly care and conceptually outline how we intend to build to a cognitive system using control theory to enable the humanoid social robot exhibiting value-sensitive actions.