From traditional games to robotic games: ethical issues with elders

This paper presents and discusses ethical issues related with the interaction of elderly people with robots while playing cognitive games. Four games were developed from classical nursing homes cognitive games, to incrementally increase its difficulty. The last one does include interaction with a robot. Several ethical issues were tackled to obtain a proper system with robots: those ethical issues were raised during the design phase and the interaction with the elders. As example of ethical issues tackled: beneficience - do not harm, and the deception and infantilisation of elderly. The games are based in objects with different shapes and colours to be positioned by the elder in pre-defined positions of a 3x3 arena, on the floor. The system then interacts with the elder given him/her the respective score, after performing image processing techniques to the image of the arena. The game with the robot consists to knock down objects in the arena, by pushing them outside the area using a car-like tele-operated robot, by the elders. The system was validated in two nursing homes, by performing experiments in the last months, and it is ethically proper.