Case Study: An Assistive Technology Ethics Survey

This chapter describes the online N-Reasons Ethics and Assistive Technology survey designed to address key ethical issues in assistive technologies. The survey was used to foster deliberation and focus discussions in a multidisciplinary workshop on assistive technologies. The survey focused on each of the four workshop topics (evaluation, sensing, networking, and mobility). This chapter thus begins with an overview of the survey design in Section 1 followed by the process that was used to establish survey content in Section 2. The results for the survey are presented in Section 3 followed by brief conclusions in Section 4. A recent Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies (PWIAS) workshop on assistive technologies brought together a multidisciplinary group of experts to discuss some of the most difficult and seemingly intractable problems in Peter A. Danielson Applied Ethics, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada e-mail: pad@