| Summary: | Purpose Demographic ageing and the shortage of professional care workers will constitute a crucial challenge for future eldercare. The introduction of care robots to support the independent life and care of older people is considered a promising solution. Despite the potential of care robots, their use also raises questions of moral acceptability, for example regarding issues of diversity sensitivity and discrimination (Weßel et al. 2021). Thus, the development and implementation of robotic systems are often based on stereotypical assumptions about the users' age and gender and neglect the diversity of their actual needs and preferences. In this paper, we explore the assumptions of professional stakeholders about the age and gender of potential users and discuss their ethical implications for morally acceptable diversity-sensitive robotics in eldercare. Method We conducted semi-structured interviews (n=16, April-June 2021) with stakeholders from technology development, marketing, and nursing in Germany. We asked to what extent they considered the age and gender of potential users as relevant and what role these categories played in the development and implementation of robots. The interviews were transcribed, coded deductively as well as inductively, and analysed with qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz 2018). Results and discussion Our results show in more detail how stakeholder assumptions regarding the age and gender of users can influence the development and implementation of care robotics. In our analysis, we identified three types of assumptions: 1) assumptions about the age and gender of users that were confirmed in practice, 2) assumptions about the age and gender of users that were not confirmed in practice, and 3) the assumption that age and gender of the users are not relevant. Overall, the stakeholder assumptions show a lack of awareness of user diversity and reveal how the development and implementation of care robots are based on stereotypes and biases regarding the age and gender of users. Based on an expanded principlist approach (Schicktanz & Schweda 2021) as well as feminist care ethics (Raghuram 2019), we argue that the diversity of users is not adequately addressed in the context of technology development and implementation. This might compromise user wellbeing, increase power imbalances in care and lead to discrimination of different users due to stereotypical stakeholder assumptions. We propose a diversity-sensitive framework for participatory technology development that includes a variety of users in the design, development, and implementation of care robots to take into account diverse user perspectives and increase user acceptance. In this context, we suggest that increased diversity on the part of the developers can make a substantial contribution to addressing the needs of more diverse users and gain access to marginalized user groups in eldercare.
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