Robots for elderly care institutions

In this paper we raise questions about the ethically appropriate use of welfare robots. As engineers, we proceed from concrete examples. We present certain use cases for ”welfare robots” that are supposed to help to maintain the quality of elder care in a Danish institution, while a dramatic demographic shift will lead to a significant problem to attract a sufficient number of ”warm hands”. In relation to these applications we describe the technical challenges in the area of ”welfare robotics” and consider how these interact with the ethical dimension of the application. We formulate three hypotheses for the ethically appropriate use of welfare robots that we hope to discuss with philosophers, thereby testing the very possibility (or necessity-?) of interdisciplinary collaborations in Robophilosophy.