IEEE Technology and Society Magazine - March 2018 - 32

skill for social cognition, and helps support interactions
with others, speech and language, and cognitive development [22], [39]. Joint attention is the ability to attend
to objects in the same space and is enacted through
pointing or gaze gestures [10].
In traditional ABA therapy, the psychotherapist works
with the child to develop these skills. In Robot En hanced Therapy (RET), the robot is used as tool by the
therapist to help the child embed these social behaviors
into their learning repertoire. The technical team provides support to the clinical team, who establish the
challenges the technical team must resolve if the robot
is to carry out any useful ABA therapy.
Research into the therapeutic development of robots
for children with autism has relied strongly on biomedical perspectives of autism as a deficit in social-communication and interaction.
We explore the ethics of robots for children with
autism as part of research conducted on the Development of Robot-Enhanced Therapy (DREAM) project. The
DREAM project was funded by the European Commission Framework 7 science program. The project runs for
five years from 2014, and will conclude in September
2018. In the DREAM description of work (DOW), the
project objectives are described as follows:
The scientific and technological goals of the
DREAM project are the study and development of
artificial cognitive robotic systems to support psychotherapy for children with mental disorders, in
particular children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). Although some research projects
focus on improving efficiency in robot assisted

FiguRE 1. Autism diversity poster.

therapies (RATs), they mainly consider only relatively passive or remote controlled tele-operated
robots. In the long term, however, therapy robots
need to become more autonomous in order to
reduce the burden on human therapists, giving
them a powerful tool for clinical interventions and
diagnostic analysis, and providing ASD children
consistent therapeutic experience (DREAM Des cription of Work FP7-ICT-2013-10-611391).
According to DREAM goals, children with ASD exhibit
a preference for interacting with non-human agents
(empathizing-systematizing theory), a theory developed
by autism expert Simon Baron-Cohen [2]. This has
meant that researchers in robotics of autism have come
to the issue with the premise (taken from a strand of
autism studies inspired largely by Baron-Cohen) that
children with autism are deficient in sociality (the ability
to relate to others and themselves), and from this assumption relate to the child with autism as though the robot
will be a preferred alternative to a human being.
The scientific team at the very onset decided to
include ethics in the project, and this article contains
the findings of the ethics team, in light of the assumptions, goals, and practices of the robotic scientist and
the clinical psychotherapists.
As an ethics team, we have tried to broaden the discussion about what autism is, and show that it is neither
a thing or fact, fixed in space or time, but undergoes
transformations as a concept, and set of practices.
Moreover, as the ethics team, we stress how important
it is to show that children with autism have a different
sociality, rather than an absent one. As the ethics team
we believe starting from the premise that children with
autism have strong emotional attachments to their primary caregivers, and express interest in other activities
besides engaging with technological items. They also
enjoy relationships with animals, physical activity, and
artistic play.
This article is informed by research conducted as
part of the ethics studies of the DREAM project and the
data are drawn from qualitative research.
In our ethical study we collected data using qualitative data collection techniques including: drawing on
technical studies of robot therapy for children with
autism; participant observation of DREAM experiments;
interviews with parents of children receiving the therapy, and parents of children not receiving the therapy;
autism specialists and educationalists, attendance at
playgroups and community groups; attendance at workshops on robot ethics; and meetings with autism specialist scholars and healthcare practitioners.
Additionally, we organized a mini public (meeting) in
early 2017 to elicit general views on the development of

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