Interfacing biomusic & autism: Integrating ethical considerations into affective technology design

Abstract

The process of designing affective technology as an assistive device needs to take ethical questions into account. Although biomusic, an affective technology, has been used effectively as an assistive communication device in the context of healthcare, its use with persons with autism in a broader context poses complex challenges. In order to understand and respond to these challenges, a 3-day workshop was organized in Montreal to gather information from stakeholders, i.e. users on the spectrum, family members and persons who work with them in educational, work, and cultural settings, on the potential uses and ethical issues of biomusic. In this paper, we report some of the outcomes of this workshop from a design perspective, which we used to generate a framework for biomusic as affective technology. This framework proposes three distinct lenses: a technological one, an ecological one, and a human-centered one. We illustrate how this framework can make visible the ethical issues that can emerge during the design process and promote collaborative and concrete solutions that respond to user concerns.