How can we ensure smart homes remain human?

The societal urgency is considerable. As populations age, demand for care continues to rise while healthcare systems face persistent staff shortages. Smart technology has the potential to help people live independently at home for longer while supporting healthcare professionals in their work. "Smart home health technologies are increasingly blurring the boundary between hospital care and care at home," says Mindy Duffourc, a researcher at Maastricht University. "This creates significant opportunities, but only if these technologies are designed carefully and with the people they are intended to serve firmly in mind."

Important questions remain. What happens when a home continuously collects data about its residents? At what point does helpful monitoring become unwanted surveillance? And who is responsible if a smart system fails to identify a risk or intervenes incorrectly? According to Duffourc, these issues cannot be addressed from the perspective of a single discipline. "We need to consider privacy, safety, autonomy and informed consent. These are all issues with both legal and ethical dimensions."

Societal challenges also pose important questions when it comes to liability. The law always struggles with new technological advances in balancing the need to regulate to ensure accountability and that of “chilling” innovation. Doctrines of liability are conceived around a human agent and now must confront harms produced by the interaction between humans and systems whose decision-making processes are often opaque. 

This is precisely why the project seeks to integrate legal and ethical expertise from the very beginning of the development of empathic housing. According to Deibel, this rarely happens in practice. "Too often, technologies are developed first, and only afterwards do people ask whether they comply with legal and ethical standards. By then, you may have to go back to the drawing board. We want to contribute to these decisions from the outset."

Within the project, Duffourc and her colleague Alice Giannini are examining questions of liability. When a resident suffers harm, legal responsibility depends on the underlying cause. Is the developer of the technology liable, the healthcare provider, or several parties simultaneously? Assessing legal responsibility in these situations involves many different factors.

The Empathic Housing project is funded by a collaboration between Maastricht University and Radboud University and brings together complementary expertise from both universities. "Maastricht has extensive legal expertise and a strong network in healthcare, coupled with specific expertise connected to liability in connection with new technologies," Deibel explains. "Researchers in Nijmegen have considerable expertise in analysing ethical considerations and critically examining issues such as surveillance and the broader societal impact of technology." These different perspectives are precisely what strengthen the project, encouraging researchers to step back, consider the bigger picture and engage in genuine interdisciplinary dialogue.

Although the project runs for only one year, the researchers see it primarily as the first step in a much broader collaboration. Working more closely with housing associations, healthcare organisations, policymakers and government ministries would be a logical next stage. As Deibel concludes: "Valuable work is already being done in many different places. We want to connect these separate initiatives and demonstrate that legal, ethical and societal questions should not be treated as an afterthought, but should form an integral part of the design process from the very beginning. The challenge is not simply to build smart houses, but to design homes that take the people living in them into account."

Author: Maxime Paulis