Professor Christine Hine, Department of Sociology.

Christine Hine is delighted to have been granted an award under the APEX scheme. These grants, promoting collaboration across science, engineering, social sciences and humanities, are jointly awarded by the British Academy, the Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society with the generous support of the Leverhulme Trust. The grants are aimed at researchers wanting to pursue interdisciplinary and curiosity-driven research that benefits wider society. Christine will be collaborating with Prof Payam Barnaghi of the UK Dementia Research Institute’s Care Research and Technology Centre to explore ethical issues arising in the development of innovations in smart care. While new smart technologies have great promise to improve the care of people living at home with long-term conditions such as dementia, these technologies also raise significant ethical challenges. Christine will be exploring how ethical challenges arise and are managed in everyday practice, through interviews with researchers, designers, engineers, healthcare professionals, carers and people living with dementia involved in development of smart technologies for care settings. As a result, we will learn more about whether ethical issues can be anticipated in advance, and will explore how to build ethical decision-making into the lifespan of a project.

Professor Christine Hine, Department of Sociology.