TrustPACTX

Title: Design of the Hybrid Society Humans-Autonomous Systems: Architecture, Trustworthiness, Trust, EthiCs, and EXplainability (the case of Patient Care)
Duration: 2 years
Starting Date: 28 October 2023

The Project’s objective is the realization of a prototype instance, related to the healthcare field, of a novel notion of “Hybrid Society” (HS) that we intend to propose, where humans and autonomous systems (AS, or “agents”) will be coupled at multiple levels. The envisaged HS will encompass human users’ principles and standards. Users in the Hybrid Society will be supported by Personal Assistant Agents (PAs), that will connect each user to the HS. PAs will play the role of “alter ego”, taking care of humans, and acting to humans’ benefit. This may be seen on the purely utilitarian side (e.g., to advise a patient to readjust a therapy) but, in a wider perspective, PAs will care about users’ needs, and will steadily provide help and assistance. The HS will have various kinds of users, including patients, doctors, caregivers, healthcare professionals, healthcare administrators. HS will provide users’ access (via their PAs) to relevant services, encapsulated in their own ASs (e.g., Emergency Room, emergency transportation, specialist clinics, entertainment facilities, etc.). We intend to define, implement, and test on real case-studies the specialized HS, incorporating therein the principles, and the ethical and conduct codes required in the healthcare field. The aim is to ensure, in perspective, high-quality, personalized, ethical, and sustainable assistance to patients. The project will devise a working approach to the design and development of the healthcare HS, by defining: (i) a technological infrastructure for the specification of HS, (ii) methods to keep under control the operation of AS, so as to ensure their trustworthiness, and a consistent behaviour of the overall system (iii) strategies to embody and enact norms and ethics in AS, and to explain their behaviour, so as to build humans’ trust in AS. The prototype system that we intend to implement may constitute a first step towards a long-term solution in the everyday management of chronic non-communicable illnesses in patients of all ages, such as, e.g., juvenile diabetes, and of many conditions in an ageing population. We will use simulations to study to what extent patients and physicians, families etc. may accept, influence, or reject decisions taken by an AS (possibly embodied in a robot). This with the objective to devise a novel theoretical framework, belonging to new trends in the cognitive sciences, where humans and AS belong to different classes of cognitive units, defined by specific cognitive abilities and related levels of autonomy. The prototype will be experimented on two case studies, one held at the Diabetes Clinic of the Hospital Ss. Annunziata (Chieti, Italy), concerning the assistance to diabetic patients, and another one held at the ESH Center of excellence for Hypertension of the University of L’Aquila, concerning the monitoring of unexpected increments in blood pressure in adult outpatients.

– Università degli Studi dell’Aquila
– Università degli Studi di Napoli Federico II
– Università degli Studi di Messina
– Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche

Ministero dell’Università e della Ricerca MUR – BANDO PRIN 2022