The increasing availability of new technologies in healthcare creates ethical dilemmas, especially in relation to responsibility, human-robot relations, liability, security, reliability, trust, and privacy. These new technologies are used in several medical fields, such as surgical innovation, rehabilitation procedures, diagnostics, and safety of health workers, among many others. Today’s debate on the ethics of new technologies used in medical activities involves fundamental ethical concepts and the principles of beneficence, nonmaleficence, social justice, autonomy, moral agents, vulnerability, and dignity. These principles are commonly used, but there is a need to go beyond principalism with proposals for new ethical systems.

Respecting biomedical ethical principles is crucial in developing and applying technologies, especially with regard to robots that will interact with human beings and affect their health. It is fundamental to understand that robotics, artificial intelligence (AI), and other new technologies in healthcare settings must not be considered as a substitute for health care workers, which remain essential, but rather as a valuable aid that allows medical staff to reduce risk, physical fatigue, and improve the efficacy and safety of clinical practice, focusing on the success of the procedure and on the objective evaluation of patient recovery. This must be done without increasing or creating any type of discrimination or inequality in patients accessing care. The importance of new technology solutions has become particularly clear in periods of worldwide pandemic, where elderly people in nursing homes have started to be infected by external healthcare personnel, and rehabilitation therapies and non-urgent surgical interventions have been stopped in the interests of safety, for both patients and medical staff. The need to ensure patient safety, while providing them with the necessary assistance, has outlined the utility of technological solutions that produce true benefits for the patients themselves and are not just designed and produced with the aim to reduce the care burden on the rest of society. We retain that an ethically based technological evolution can be obtained only by adopting an approach that can provide important elements to designers in the technological field to carry out projects with a high degree of social acceptability, as they are based on the real needs of formal caregivers and patients.

The aim of this Special Issue is to analyse how and which ethical aspects have to be considered in designing and developing new technologies for healthcare, and how ethical principles have been taken into account in the last research achievements in this field. We welcome both original research and review articles.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• Ethics in healthcare
• Ethically designed robots and assistive technologies
• Ethical visions of human-machine interaction
• Legal aspects in the use of new technologies
• Ethics in the use of artificial intelligence technology
• Rights and responsibilities in artificial moral agents
• Roboethics
• Ethical codes for new technology production
• Security and safety in autonomous systems
• Ethical aspects of technological embodiment
• Ethical aspects of social and assistive robots
• Emotional machines
• Sustainable development goals for good health and well-being and reduced inequality
• Trust and new technologies