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Empowering Patients in Interactive Unity with Machines: Engineering the HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) Robotic Rehabilitation System

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Humans and Devices in Medical Contexts

Part of the book series: Health, Technology and Society ((HTE))

Abstract

With the development of robotics-based technologies for human healthcare, human–machine interaction is gaining increasing importance, bringing with it ethical considerations, including the impairment of patients and potential risks to their integrity. This study investigates the Cybernics approach to the robotic rehabilitation system HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) as a socio-technological conception of human–machine relations. Contrary to common individualistic conceptions, this heterarchic approach to empowerment technologies (ET) builds on an intrinsic relation between human and machine, in which machines are primarily regarded as a supplement and not a threat to impaired humans. This leads to the question of how ET are constructed and legitimized in Japan, and what relationship between humans and machines is envisioned in the context of healthcare. In referencing Society 5.0 as the developmental framework for ET in Japan, the Cybernics approach to ET as employed at the University of Tsukuba and a case study of the HAL system as enabling an interactive unity of human and machine show that the socio-technological conception proposes a capability-oriented approach with built-in ethics, offering a complementary view to prevailing accounts of human–machine relations.

This case study draws on my long-term collaboration with the Cybernics group since 2011 and was supported by JSPS KAKENHI Grant Number JP 18K00035. As a visiting researcher at the Center for Cybernics Research, my work concerns cognitive models of voluntary initiation of gait movement (Grüneberg et al. 2015, 2018). In addition to this work on the cognitive analysis of the HAL system, another research project concerns the norms and values underlying the design and implementation of an interactive unity in HMR. In the course of this latter project, I conducted interviews with two robotics engineers at the Center for Cybernics Research about their views on HMR, the HAL system, and related social and ethical issues. Both interviewees are aware of the research purpose and gave their informed consent to the anonymous citation of their statements. Each interview lasted 50 minutes, followed semi-structured guidelines and was analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Gläser and Laudel 2013).

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Notes

  1. 1.

    McCulloch first introduced the term in the context of describing the neural behaviour of reflexes. He concluded that an organism has a “heterarchy of values, and is thus internectively too rich to submit to a summum bonum” (McCulloch 1945, 92; for a logical foundation see Günther 1971).

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List of Interviews

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  1. Kanazawa University, Kanazawa, Japan

    Patrick Grüneberg

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  1. Patrick Grüneberg
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Correspondence to Patrick Grüneberg .

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  1. German Institute for Japanese Studies (DIJ), Tokyo, Japan

    Susanne Brucksch

  2. Center for Medical Education, Sapporo Medical University, Sapporo, Japan

    Kaori Sasaki

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Grüneberg, P. (2021). Empowering Patients in Interactive Unity with Machines: Engineering the HAL (Hybrid Assistive Limb) Robotic Rehabilitation System. In: Brucksch, S., Sasaki, K. (eds) Humans and Devices in Medical Contexts. Health, Technology and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-33-6280-2_10

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