memo35-ethics

In my project, some believes that using robots for people with psychological disorders are against ethical rules that will even worsen the symptoms of their disease. Psychiatrists should follow specific ethical codes, such as not telling every truth about their illnesses and even the dangerous effects of their disease. So when a schizophrenic patient was requested to communicate with a robot, which some call them as talking dolls, maybe his/her symptoms will be worsen , for example the anger symptom. One of the problems that schizophrenic patients have is the lack of emotional support. Most of them are disable to have a family and get married so they lack emotional support. By interfering gender and sexuality in designing robots, as using female robots for treating male schizophrenic patient or vice versa, some may object that this is not ethical. They may argue that making a short period emotional communications between robots and schizophrenic patients cannot help to treat even will worsen the symptoms. The specific robot that is used for the clinical observation cannot be always around schizophrenic patient ; the patient is just going to make communication with these patients for 6 month, so what if the schizophrenic patient emotionally become connected to the robots , so we have just worsened their emotional condition. The other ethical problem is that these robots are expensive to buy by these patients and just can be used in clinics. So if the patient become connected emotionally with the specific robot that was used for the observational field, it would be impossible for him/her to buy it. On the other hand, designing and making robots are too expensive and time consuming, what if the schizophrenic patient react aggressively to these robots and started attacking the robots? As any, even minor flaws in robots would make robots disable to use.