June 2022 A Small Set of Ethical Challenges For Elder-care Robots Rajitha RAMANAYAKE a and Vivek NALLUR a a University College Dublin Abstract. Elder-care robots have been suggested as a solution for the rising elder- care needs. Although many elder-care agents are commercially available, there are concerns about the behaviour of these robots in ethically charged situations. How- ever, we do not find any evidence of ethical reasoning abilities in commercial of- ferings. Assuming that this is due to the lack of agreed-upon standards, we offer a categorization of elder-care robots, and ethical ‘whetstones’ for them to hone their abilities. Keywords. Elder-care, Robots, Machine ethics, Evaluation 1. Introduction Europe faces a rising tide of an ageing population. The ratio of working-age people to people above 65 years in the EU is projected to be less than 2:1 by 2070 [1]. As a solution to the problem of caring for the elderly, many have proposed the use of robots and other related technologies. Many commercial implementations of elder-care robots of varying abilities are available [2,3,4]. Due to the sensitive nature of the elder-care domain, many ethical concerns have been raised with delegating the work previously done by human care workers to robots. Many empirical studies have concluded that these concerns still exist in present-day im- plementations of elder-care robots [5,6]. However, we do not see any road-maps or ac- tions taken to mitigate these concerns. Speculating that this is due to the lack of ethical milestones that are commonly agreed upon, we offer a small set of ethical challenges that we believe elder-care robots should be able to deal with. We believe that thinking about, and explicitly addressing these challenges will lead to better elder-care robots. Given the robot’s approach to these challenges, an assisted-living facility would be able to make a reasoned decision about deploying them in sensitive settings. The next section of this paper will explore the current elder-care robots and the type of robots available. Followed by a discussion on concerns regarding elder-care robots in inter-personal situations. The paper will then introduce the use of ethically charged scenarios as challenges to test the capability of ethical behaviour and biases of the robots, and finally discuss a small set of scenarios that can be used as ethical challenges for elder-care robots.