Applying a care-centered ethical framework when designing robot-assisted medication counselling: a community pharmacy design case study

Abstract Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) have propelled organizations and researchers to call for ethical, responsible, and sustainable deployment of AI-enhanced systems in critical contexts such as healthcare. While legal frameworks like the European Union AI Act are in force, governing AI use and emphasizing ethics, there are a wide range of frameworks and guidelines with no legally binding force that underscore ethics when designing, deploying, and evaluating socially beneficial AI systems. Examples include ethics guidelines for trustworthy artificial intelligence, human-centered AI, and value-sensitive design. AI in community pharmacies is a comparatively nascent field. Nevertheless, research and design initiatives exploring its potential to transform pharmacy practice are subject to the same ethical requirements. Despite the abundance of ethical frameworks, guidance on their operationalization into concrete activities is comparatively scarce. We seek to address this research gap by demonstrating how a value-sensitive design ethical framework can be implemented within research-through-design projects concerning conversational AI on a robot platform. We describe how we employed the care-centered ethical framework while exploring robot-assisted medication counselling in Finnish community pharmacies. We outline phases and activities carried out within the steps of the framework, with a special focus on the pharmacy environment. We conclude by recommendations for applying the framework in processes involving socially assistive robots. The contribution of the paper is an overview of how the Care-Centered framework can be operationalized, alongside an evaluation of its applicability. Additionally, the study examines the relationship between care ethics and socially assistive robots within a real-world healthcare setting.