What is it about?

This paper aims to present an overview of the various ethical, societal and critical issues that micro- and nanotechnology-based small, energy self-sufficient sensor systems raise in different selected application fields. An ethical approach on the development of these technologies was taken in a very large international, multitechnological European project. The authors approach and methodology are presented in the paper and, based on this review, the authors propose general principles for this kind of work.

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Why is it important?

Ethical challenges of future technologies are multifaceted, and almost infinite when considering different possible contexts and stakeholders. They are also in many cases quite hard to predict and vision concretely. The basic technology should be safe and secure as such, applications should be safe and secure and human values such as privacy, autonomy, trust should not be violated by the technology or the applications. These ethical issues have frequently been raised as important factors in the user requirement definition process. (Kosta et al., 2008; Rotter, 2008) But ethics has also gained much more visibility as a more important general view in terms of research and innovation (Stahl et al., 2010; Wakunuma et al., 2011). Recently, ethical and societal issues have been emphasised in the European research program Horizon 2020, and a new Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) approach is proposed for both academia and industry. Engagement, open access, gender equality, ethics, science education and governance are presented as critical dimensions for RRI (European Commission, 2013). But it is not yet clear how this approach would work in real life in particular cases. We intend to give some idea of the implementation of RRI, putting emphasis mainly on the ethics and governance dimensions.

Perspectives

We describe practical experience about ethical design in research, innovation and development in general and more specifically in the context of micro- and nanotechnologies. The responsibility concept has been launched while EU seeks to become a genuine Innovation Union in 2020 striving for excellent science, a competitive industry and a better society without compromising on sustainability goals as well as ethically acceptable and socially desirable conditions.

Mr Veikko Ikonen
VTT Ltd

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This page is a summary of: Human-driven design of micro- and nanotechnology based future sensor systems, Journal of Information Communication and Ethics in Society, May 2015, Emerald,
DOI: 10.1108/jices-10-2013-0039.
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