Digital Ethics
The research group studies how professionals can design meaningful digital innovations, taking into account the needs and values of all parties involved and how professionals can develop the necessary digital and ethical skills.
Lines of research within the research group
Technological developments offer many new possibilities. Digital innovations however are not neutral as they are designed to be used. It is of great importance that professionals are aware of this while working on innovations. This line of research focuses on specifying the problem and designing a solution while constantly taking human values into consideration.
After designing the digital innovation, it is configured and implemented in a certain context. This line of research focuses on how field professionals can implement and utilize the innovation and how this effects the work environment. Here, the use context is key.
Improving decision making at governmental institutions through decision mining
Outcome of decision making in governmental institutions could easily increase, or violate public value. In the proposal a new decision support related method is proposed to be constructed for increasing positive contribution to public value.
SamBuddy, the storytelling cuddle for education, elderly care and healthcare
Almost half of the children who are bullied do not share it with an adult. As a result, these children experience loneliness, lack of self-confidence and even depression. By letting these children share their problems with a robot, they can more easily overcome the struggles they experience.
Exploring how social robots can improve children’s well-being during hospitalization
Young pediatric patients who undergo venipuncture or capillary blood sampling often experience high levels of pain and anxiety. This often results in distressed young patients and their parents, increased treatment times, and a higher workload for healthcare professionals. Social robots are a new and promising tool to mitigate children’s pain and anxiety.
Publications
- Attitudes towards Social Robots in Education Enthusiast, Practical, Troubled, Sceptic, and Mindfully Positive
- Mitigating Children’s Pain and Anxiety during Blood Draw Using Social Robots
- A Capability Model for Learning Analytics Adoption Identifying organizational capabilities from literature on big data analytics, business analytics, and learning analytics
Education
Digital Ethics contributes to digital innovation for educational purposes and the development of digital and ethical awareness of (upcoming) professionals. We are involved in the Digital Twins Lab and have strong ties with the Institutes for ICT, Engineering & Design, Media and Archimedes.
“Digital services should not only be meaningful in the sense of being directly valuable to an organisation or customer, but also meaningful in an ethical sense. Ethical policy must therefore be an integral part of the organisational design.”
Marlies van Steenbergen Professor of Digital Ethics
Collaboration
Organizations are looking for ways to responsibly leverage digitalization. Domain expertise and knowledge of ethics and IT are brought together. The research group works on assignments and projects covering this; it performs research with partners; sometimes with (co) financing.