Nursing Ethical Considerations in the AI-Based Technologies

Nursing Ethical Considerations in the AI-Based Technologies

Purpose: As artificial intelligence(AI) has currently used in many ways related to nurses, there is an ultimate need to consider the ethical values of AI in healthcare. Thus, the present study first investigates several types of AI-based technologies and robotics applied to nursing, such as supportive, cooperative, and collaborative robots. Moreover, several ethical guidelines and requirements for AI, ethical issues and concerns of AI, especially nursing ethical considerations, are explored based on the principles of biomedical ethics and the nursing code of ethics. Method: We searched for existing scientific literature using the keywords “AI or Robot or Nurses”, “AI or Robot and Ethics” in PubMed until March 2022. Next, we reviewed the articles related to ethical issues and considera-tions in AI-based technologies, especially in the field of healthcare. In addition, a web-based search about robot-ics in nursing was conducted to find out their specific roles. Results: The direction of ethical discussion of AI has changed from Roboethics, which emphasizes ro-bot’s behavior and the responsibility of robots, to ethics for humans, such as developers and users. There are many ways AI is helping to overcome health care challenges, such as diagnosis, precision medicine, and prediction models. For the safety of human-robot interaction, ethics of caring need to be discussed in close proximity for nurses, patients, or both. Therefore, AI needs to consider patient safety first, do no harm and aggravate the patient’s condition, sufficiently provide to treat diseases and improve patients’ health conditions, and the service needs to be distributed equally without prejudice and discrimination regardless of medical problems. Conclusion: As AI has incredible potential to empower people and widely benefit current and future generations, AI ethics needs to be further discussed in a direction in harmony with the development of related industries. Nurses should understand AI applications and their implications for nursing research and practice to improve patient care and clinical outcome. In addition, careful ethical considerations and engagement with nurses in implementing and evaluating AI-based technologies in healthcare are critical to the best clinical decisions and developing reliable innovations.