Public Defence: Erik Thorstensen
Erik Thorstensen will defend his thesis: «Responsible Assessments. Frameworks for a Value-Based Governance of Assistive Technologies» for the degree of PhD in The Study of Professions.
Erik Thorstensen will defend his thesis: «Responsible Assessments. Frameworks for a Value-Based Governance of Assistive Technologies» for the degree of PhD in The Study of Professions.
Opponents
Leader of the public defence is professor Fredrik Thue, OsloMet.
The candidate's supervisors are Ellen-Marie Forsberg, Øsfoldforskning AS, and professor Anders Molander, OsloMet.
This thesis investigates Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) and its possible application for assessing assistive technologies. Such assessments aim to produce ethically acceptable solutions as well as enhanced value for the user groups. RRI connects science, innovation, society and citizens in the creation of social goods or the realisation of social values through research and development processes.
Although RRI has been an ideal for the governance of science for almost a decade, it remains little studied, in particular in the field of health and assistive technologies. The notion has received support from several European research funding agencies, but is still only in its infancy when it comes to concrete application with and for citizens and society.
The goal of this thesis is to investigate how the governance of assistive technologies can become more responsible through assessments. The research process underlying this investigation was itself inspired by RRI.
Through extensive literature searches and several engagement activities with potential users, important stakeholders and their representatives, this thesis investigates the performance of socio-ethical assessments of assistive technologies in light of RRI. It draws on earlier research on Technology Assessment (TA) and applied ethics – and the interconnections between these
two traditions – to investigate how these traditions might deliver assessment frameworks in ine with the normative demands of RRI; and how to relate these traditions to Health Technology Assessments (HTA), the main approach to making policy decisions on new health interventions.
By using of a combination of two such frameworks, the Ethical Matrix and the Socratic approach, this thesis suggests that an exploratory approach to RRI can inform assessment strategies and has the potential to enhance responsibility through both process and product selection. In particular, the thesis illustrates that there are lacunas in the municipal innovation process, where value decisions are made, and that structured assessment methodologies could improve the quality of such decisions.
The thesis contributes to an understanding of what RRI could entail in practical research through using its methodological and normative positions as points of departure for investigations into the values in assistive technologies. It also introduces a new approach to innovation chains for assistive technologies in municipalities and it explores how to enhance methods in applied ethics through a combination of the Ethical Matrix and the Socratic approach.