Ethics of healthcare robotics: Towards responsible research and innovation

•Traditional approaches to the ethics of robotics are often distant from innovation practices and contexts of use.•We list key concerns of ethics of healthcare robots.•Collaborative and embedded ethics can help address ethics of healthcare robotics.•Responsible research and innovation (RRI) offers a broad array of tools to ensure acceptability of technology.•RRI in ICT can point out how social concerns can be incorporated.

How can we best identify, understand, and deal with ethical and societal issues raised by healthcare robotics? This paper argues that next to ethical analysis, classic technology assessment, and philosophical speculation we need forms of reflection, dialogue, and experiment that come, quite literally, much closer to innovation practices and contexts of use. The authors discuss a number of ways how to achieve that. Informed by their experience with “embedded” ethics in technical projects and with various tools and methods of responsible research and innovation, the paper identifies “internal” and “external” forms of dialogical research and innovation, reflections on the possibilities and limitations of these forms of ethical-technological innovation, and explores a number of ways how they can be supported by policy at national and supranational level.