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. The eLaw Center for Law and Digital Technologies participates 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 and Assisted Living (AAL) are a possible solution to face them. AAL aims 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 (assisted persons and professional and informal caregivers.)

The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) establishes the obligation for technologies to meet data protection principles by design and data protection by default. Therefore, AAL solutions must consider privacy-by-design methodologies in order to protect the fundamental rights of those being monitored.

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.

Prof. B. H. M. Custers and Dr. E. Fosch Villaronga are Members of the Committee of GoodBrother and will actively contribute to Work Package 1 on Social responsibility: Ethical, legal, social, data protection and privacy issues. 

More information can be found on Twitter @goodbrotherCOST, or on Linkedin. 

The Cost Action 16116 on Wearable Robots aims to integrate and develop diverse expertise and trans-domain competences essential to the development of a new generation of Wearable Robots, characterized by better adjustment to the human users, as well as to specific domains of application, thus allowing it to become a mainstream technology with potential for greatly expanded socio-economical impact.

Heike Felzmann, Anne-Marie Hughes, Alexandra Kapeller, Eduard Fosch-Villaronga were the co-leaders of the Working Group 4 on the Ethical, Legal, and Societal Aspects. The Ethical, Legal and Societal (ELS) aspects of Wearable Robotics (WRs) are wide in scope, ranging from individual’s personal experience of using WRs to larger social concerns about human-enhancement or possible economic implications. The working group on ELS engages with these issues in order to help create technologies that have high rates of user-acceptability and help to improve the user’s Quality of Life (QoL). 

This working group will work towards the following goals: identify the values that motivate both building and using the technology; consider possible tensions between values; and, recommend ways of multi-stakeholder collaboration. Examples of ELS areas of interest in WRs include: user’s personal experience, public acceptability, driving forces for use and development, potential economic shifts, and consequences of human-enhancement. The working group is interdisciplinary, and draws upon ELS theories to analyze various WR applications at all stages of development. 

The working group’s activities include: multidisciplinary workshops, collaborative research projects, STSMs, and joint publications. One of the major inputs is a Topical issue on the Ethical, Legal, and Societal Aspects of Wearable Robotics in the Paladyn Journal of Behavioral Robotics.