Privacy and Healthcare Robots – An ANT Analysis

The privacy implications of social robots are far-reaching and concern both informational and physical privacy. In this contribution we address the topic of healthcare robots and privacy. We use actor network theory (ANT) to shed light on the privacy implications of healthcare robots from a specific theoretical point of view. ANT is a descriptive, constructivist approach that takes into account the agency of objects, concepts and ideas as well as the relationality of technology and the social. It has been applied to complex technological innovations, such as ehealth systems. We use some of the main concepts of ANT—actants, translations, tokens/quasiobjects, punctualization, obligatory passage point—to “map” the privacy ecosystem in robotic healthcare technology, thereby analyzing the complex interplay of robots and humans in that context. Altogether, our contribution shows that ANT is a fruitful lens through which to study the interaction between humans and (social) robots because of its richness of useful concepts, its balanced perspective which evades both technology-determinism and social-determinism, and its openness towards new connected technology.