Governance Node Seminar - Cian O'Donovan, UCL

How and what health and care professionals do will be changed by the use of robotics technologies in their workplaces. This paper reports results of a 12-month scoping project in which together with participants such as nurses, physiotherapists and occupational therapists, we thought through how robotics and autonomous systems (RAS) might develop in ways that empower professionals and are safe, trustworthy, legal and ethical. Our research shows a diversity of tasks are valued by professionals and a range of human capabilities are required throughout care organisations in order to support them. We also offer implications for governance and research evaluation. As we see a shift from laboratory development of RAS towards their implementation in real life settings such as care, questions of responsibility evolve from developing RAS that behave in effective, safe and accountable ways towards a wider agenda of how them may become embedded in socio-technical configurations. We believe our capabilities approach - based on Sen's ideas from development economics - offers an analytic tool that might in the first instance evaluate how co-design research projects contribute to building capabilities for responsible innovation within research groups and with lay partners. In the second, how the formative evaluation of entire research programmes such as TAS might assess broader capacities to embed robotics in and with society.