Our research article, Emotional State Recognition for Personalized Robot Behavior Adaptation: Ethical Implications, was earlier accepted for oral presentation at a workshop on Social Robots in Therapy: Focusing on Autonomy and Ethical Challenges, in conjunction with the 13th ACM / IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (HRI 2018). Our researcher, Jainendra Shukla delivered an oral presentation of the article at the workshop which was held in Chicago, IL, USA from March 5–8, 2018. In this research we have argued that Socially Assistive Robotics (SAR) based cognitive stimulation interactions work mainly on the cognitive level of the target user. Therefore, ethical implications around such robot interactions goes beyond the physical level and hence, require a new set of regulations and guidelines.

The paper raised quite interesting and thought provoking questions on the ethical legal and social implications of social robots interactions at a cognitive level, in addition to the ones at a physical level, provoking a great discussion during the workshop on the same.

It was a very fruitful experience as we were able to network with prominent researchers in human-robot interaction from all around the globe, such as Prof. Brian Scassellati, Prof. Ana Paiva etc. We gained several important insights from these encounters and we are now working eagerly to incorporate these insights into our research and development to improve the quality of life in health and social care. This research work has been supported by the Industrial Doctorate program (Ref. ID.: 2014-DI-022) of AGAUR, Govt. of Catalonia. We also gratefully acknowledge collaboration of Ave Maria Foundation (FAM) in this research.