Designing autonomous crawling equipment to detect personal connected devices and support rescue operations: Technical and societal concerns

Gathering and processing reliable information is a major aspect in disaster management. That is why information technologies have used been more and more for this purpose. Currently, two new trends seem to emerge. On the one hand, personal digital devices, such as smartphones, tablets, and smart watches are becoming more and more popular. On the other hand, the range of application of autonomous civilian drones and robots is becoming wider than before. One can therefore make use of the latter to quickly detect the former when a crisis occurs, given the hypothesis that connected devices are nowadays mainly attached to a person rather than a place, as in the past. This paper thus aims at studying the technological and ethical, legal, and social questions that such a methodology raises. We propose to frame our forthcoming research into an “ethics-by-design” approach, which will be supported by anticipating effective operational uses (an information-technology-appropriation approach).