Journal articles

Science has started highlighting the importance of integrating diversity considerations in medicine and healthcare. However, there is little research into how these considerations apply, affect, and should be integrated into concrete healthcare innovations such as rehabilitation robotics. Robot policy ecosystems are also oblivious to the vast landscape of gender identity understanding, often ignoring these considerations and failing to guide developers in integrating them to ensure they meet user needs.

While this ignorance may be for the traditional heteronormative configuration of the medical, technical, and legal world, the ending result is the failure of roboticists to consider them in robot development. However, missing diversity, equity, and inclusion considerations can result in robotic systems that can compromise user safety, be discriminatory, and not respect their fundamental rights. This paper explores the impact of overlooking gender and sex considerations in robot design on users. We focus on the safety standard for personal care robots ISO 13482:2014 and zoom in on lower-limb exoskeletons.

Our findings signal that ISO 13482:2014 has significant gaps concerning intersectional aspects like sex, gender, age, or health conditions and, because of that, developers are creating robot systems that, despite adherence to the standard, can still cause harm to users. In short, our observations show that robotic exoskeletons operate intimately with users’ bodies, thus exemplifying how gender and medical conditions might introduce dissimilarities in human–robot interaction that, as long as they remain ignored in regulations, may compromise user safety. We conclude the article by putting forward particular recommendations to update ISO 13482:2014 to reflect better the broad diversity of users of personal care robots.

This paper analyzes and classifies regulatory gaps and inconsistencies in ISO 13482:2014 (‘Safety Requirements for Personal Care Robots'), specifically regarding robotic lower-limb exoskeletons, being personal care robots, for everyday activities. Following a systematic literature review, our findings support the conclusion that, even though ISO 13482:2014 has proven to be a substantial step towards regulating that type of wearable robot, it fails to address safety sufficiently and comprehensively.

That failure results in a general overlook of critical legal, ethical, and social considerations when designing robots, with the consequence that seemingly safe systems might nonetheless harm end-users. Notwithstanding those limitations and impediments to the development of safe technologies, to date, there has been no thorough assessment of how the standard regulates the development of exoskeletons and whether it requires any improvement in light of ethical, legal, and societal considerations.

To bridge this gap, we compile relevant areas for improvement concerning ISO 13482:2014 fueled by these considerations. We do so in an accessible manner and provide concrete recommendations to help decision-makers overcome the standard's drawbacks.

While the pace of digitization and its impacts on society and markets have become an independent topic of research and debate, far less is clear on how the traditional regulatory functions of governments should evolve with these transformative changes. In this article, we explain how technology disrupts the legal ecosystem and how an uncontrolled legal environment may provide carte blanche to techno-solutionism and cause disruptions that affect practices and society.

In the face of uncertainty regarding the implications of fundamental rights and liberties at the core of liberal democracies, we outline two possible legal sustainability approaches, weak and strong, respectively. We do so by borrowing from the economic literature on environmental externalities and sustainability paradigms of economic growth.

In this frame, we present a three-step process to align the order of rules with that of actions to create better conditions for a smooth and sustainable co-evolution between technological ecosystems and the prevailing institutions. Such a process aims at bridging information asymmetries by generating policy-relevant data, sharing knowledge among stakeholders to understand and make sense of such information, and creating opportunities for those ideas to turn into an “action” in the world of actions. In doing so, we strive for brokering knowledge between economic agents and regulators since only by having a shared common understanding of the state of affairs a shared normative view on the matter can follow.