Trustworthy AAL Design Cards
Creators: name: Riva, Gianluigi M.
name: Fedosov, Anton
name: Florez-Revuelta, Francisco
name: Colantonio, Sara
name: Lutz, Christoph
name: Tamò-Larrieux, Aurelia
name: Kuźmicz, Maksymilian M.
name: Colonna, Liane
name: Lameski, Petre
name: Zdravevski, Eftim
name: Pocta, Peter
name: Sklavos, Nicolas
name: Puaschitz, Nathalie G.S.
name: Dantas, Carina
name: Metin, Ebru
name: van Staalduinen, Willeke
name: Gürçinar, Elif
Publisher: name: GoodBrother COST Action
Year: 2024

description: This Trustworthy AAL Design Cards collection is intended as a practical set of easy-to-read guidelines for AAL practitioners. In particular, these cards provide actionable, understandable, and specific guidance to developers, designers, and other stakeholders involved in the lifecycle of AAL systems. The key stakeholders are the professionals who need to create and implement trustworthy AAL systems. The purpose of the cards is to serve as a reference tool, providing clear guidelines for stakeholders. By offering structured advice across different stages of research, design, development, and deployment, the cards aim to foster a comprehensive approach to the ethical and compliant creation of trustworthy AAL technologies. Each card is grounded in relevant scholarly works, legal frameworks, and ethical and technological standards and offers a policy recommendation, giving stakeholders the tools they need to make informed decisions at every step of the process.

The primary goal of the Cards is to support the stakeholders through the complex process of creating AAL technologies that can be functional, fair, ethical, and compliant with legal standards. This effort drew upon collaborative design approaches (e.g., co-conceptualization and co-creation) and resulted in actionable guidelines for AAL practitioners in order to improve feasibility and compliance with technical and legal requirements and effectively preserve the privacy of end-users. In particular, the cards focus on privacy as a fundamental consideration, ensuring that the systems respect users' personal data and autonomy. Privacy violations or ethical oversights can lead to a breakdown of trust in both end-users and other stakeholders involved in the care provision, rendering even the most innovative AAL solutions unviable. Therefore, this collection emphasizes the design of trustworthy systems that users and practitioners feel confident adopting.

The primary stakeholders of the Trustworthy AAL Design Cards are developers and designers; however, project managers and decision-makers who work within the AAL domain will benefit from the cards as well. While the technical expertise of these individuals may vary, the cards aim to provide accessible and comprehensible guidelines that cut across disciplines. For these reasons, contributors who designed the cards span across a variety of fields and scientific disciplines. Developers and designers who are directly responsible for the technical and user interface aspects of AAL systems will find the cards useful for embedding ethical and privacy-conscious practices from the early stages of the development process. At the same time, policymakers, legal experts, and ethicists can use the cards to ensure that their insights are integrated into the technological process, fostering interdisciplinary collaboration.

The Trustworthy AAL Design Cards are organized to reflect the four critical stages in the development of AAL systems: Research, Design, Development, and Deployment/Maintenance. Each stage introduces unique challenges related to privacy, ethics, and compliance. The cards offer tailored advice for navigating these challenges. The research phase is foundational to the development of AAL systems. It involves gathering data, defining user needs, and analysing the technological and ethical implications of potential solutions. During this phase, it is essential to ensure that research methodologies respect privacy laws, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) or the Medical Device Regulation, among others, and maintain the dignity and rights of participants. The Cards offer specific guidelines on how to conduct research ethically, including recommendations on obtaining informed consent, anonymising data, and ensuring transparency in data collection and use. The design phase involves conceptualising the AAL system’s functionality, user interface, and interactions. This stage requires a careful balance between user experience and privacy. The Cards encourage developers and designers to adopt privacy-by-design approaches and data minimisation principles to ensure that privacy considerations are integrated into the system’s architecture from the outset. The Cards, thus, provide insights into designing systems that are intuitive, secure, and capable of handling sensitive data responsibly. The development stage translates design concepts into tangible interactive products or services. This phase requires adherence to technical standards and legal regulations, particularly those related to data protection and information security. The Cards offer advice on selecting appropriate security methods, implementing secure data storage, and ensuring that user data is processed lawfully and ethically in every stage of its lifecycle. Additionally, the Cards offer pointers to developers on conducting security assessments and integrating feedback loops to address potential ethical and privacy issues as they arise. Finally, once an AAL system is deployed, continuous monitoring and maintenance are necessary to ensure it remains functional, secure, and compliant with evolving legal standards. The Cards emphasise the importance of post-deployment assessments and monitoring, focusing on timely updates of privacy policies, conducting regular security audits, and engaging with users to gather feedback. This stage also involves managing data retention and ensuring that users have control over their data, including options for data deletion or modification in compliance with legal rights.

The Trustworthy AAL Design Cards are designed to be flexible and easy to integrate into the workflow of stakeholders at various stages of AAL system development. Each card is structured around a specific issue or challenge, identifying the different stages in which it applies and providing actionable recommendations for addressing it. The structure is aimed at enhancing rapid understanding of the main elements of the topic addressed; for this reason, they provide questions and answers, keywords, examples, or scenarios that may clarify the context. For instance, one card may focus on obtaining informed consent in the research phase, while another might provide advice on implementing data encryption during development. The cards are concise and self-contained, allowing stakeholders to reference them quickly as they progress through the stages of their project. Likewise, they all contain actionable policy recommendations to guide the development process, and, when applicable, they offer a legal recommendation with an explicit reference to the specific legal requirements for that scenario. This approach intends to provide stakeholders with a brief explanation of the legal or ethical rationale behind each issue addressed, ensuring that they not only know what to do but also understand why it is important. This feature helps bridge the gap between disciplines, allowing developers and designers to engage with legal and ethical considerations without requiring deep expertise in those fields. However, they are not meant to remove or replace legal experts throughout these phases. Additionally, the cards are designed for an iterative development process, meaning stakeholders can revisit them as new challenges or questions arise.

In conclusion, within a rapidly evolving field like AAL, where technological advances should be balanced with ethical and legal considerations, the Trustworthy AAL Design Cards provide an essential tool for developers, designers, and other stakeholders to readily access multidisciplinary know-how concerning AAL technology and service design. By offering clear, actionable, and reliable guidance across the lifecycle of AAL systems – from research to deployment – the Cards enable stakeholders to design innovative technologies that are trustworthy and compliant with privacy and ethical standards. Ultimately, the cards bridge the technical, legal, and ethical domains, ensuring that AAL technologies can be developed fairly, respecting users' rights and needs, and fostering trust in their adoption.