by Prof. Dr. theol. habil. Arne Manzeschke ¹, Prof. Dr. phil. habil. Karsten Weber ², Elisabeth Rother, BA ³, Univ.-Prof. Dr. med. Heiner Fangerau ⁴

• ¹ Director of the department ‘Ethics and Anthropology in Health Care’ Institute Technology · Theology · Sciences Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich
• ² Professor for General Science of Technology BTU Cottbus-Senftenberg Institute for Social Research and Technologial Impact Assessment (IST)
• ³ Alice-Salomon-University of Applied Sciences-Berlin
• ⁴ Director of the Institute for History and Ethics of Medicine University of Cologne

The use of age appropriate assisting systems poses this kind of serious moral question: how can we serve elderly people in their neediness and help them to live lives on their own? Theirs are lives that perhaps involve frailness, but most certainly involve mortality. Lives that want to be lived with the greatest possible individuality and freedom. We may therefore ask: what are the political, moral and economic resources which society delivers to support elderly people? Whether and to what extent this support is provided in technical form is a question not only of the moral and political obligations that are binding upon a society, but also of the technical nature of the support: how does technology change the fabric of society and the cohesive forces within it?