| Date | November 2019 | Marks available | 6 | Reference code | 19N.2.HL.TZ0.13 |
| Level | HL | Paper | 2 | Time zone | no time zone |
| Command term | Explain | Question number | 13 | Adapted from | N/A |
Question
Southend Council in England is considering whether to use Pepper, a humanoid robot, to assist some elderly residents that live in care homes. These elderly residents suffer from memory loss and would rely on Pepper to direct them them to and from the local shops. Pepper uses ambient intelligence and is connected to the Internet of Things (IoT).
Explain why Southend Council may have concerns about introducing Pepper for this purpose.
Markscheme
Award [6 max].
The journey from the care home to the local shops may lead to Pepper encountering a large range of environments that may go beyond the ambient intelligence that Pepper posseses;
Which may mean that the information that Pepper can obtain from the environment by using ambient intelligence may be limited and lead to sub-optimal decisions being taken, some of which could have serious consequences;
Some of the residents may have trust issues associated with relying on Pepper, or they have be too trusting and delegate all decision making to Pepper when it is not appropriate;
Families and carers for these residents may have concerns about what information is being collected and shared by Pepper;
There may be issues of accountability that have not been resolved should an accident occur when Pepper is acting as a decision maker;
There may be technical issues such as black spots where Pepper is unable to communicate with the IoT that need to be addressed;
The trialing of Pepper may not have been sufficiently rigorous to train Pepper to act “correctly” in any given situation;
Examiners report
Candidates came up with a variety of reasons for not continuing with this project they clearly did not think it was a good idea.
