Suppose your final-year project has the goal of producing a web-based application for older adults living at home and their family or friends who are helping care for them. The application provides advice based on interpreting data from sensors placed in the person's house that measure movement, temperature, sound, air quality, and humidity. The sensors are placed in every room and continuously stream data to the web application for analysis.
a) Explain the different issues you would need to address for gaining ethics clearance for the project from Aston University (8 marks)
b) Suppose sensors in two of the houses failed to work properly because of a manufacturing fault and nobody tested their outputs. The sensors fed false data into the web-based decision support application, which generated wrong advice. In one house, it meant nobody helped the person, who was unable to move for 24 hours because of a fall. In the other house, nothing bad happened to the person before the fault was discovered. Explore how the ethical theories of consequentialism, deontology, and human nature could give different interpretations of who was in the wrong and what punishment should apply to them, for the outcomes in EACH house. For this question, you may need to make up some additional details about the project so that it is able to generate a better example of how the ethics issues apply to it. You will gain some marks for a sensible and appropriate extended specification that enables the question to be more comprehensively answered.
c) Suppose you have a brainwave for a new type of sensor linked to the web-based application that will be much better at detecting people having a fall in the house. You want to set up a company and employ people as soon as possible.
i) Explain the moral, ethical, and professional issues involved in selecting suitable employees for your company (10 marks)
ii) Explain what intellectual property you would need to protect and how to protect it to stop other companies stealing your ideas and their application (10 marks)
iii) Explain how your company would meet the legal requirements of the General Data Protection Regulation of 2018 (10 marks)
