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Hearbles offer new perspectives for medicine and healthcare in old age. They not only promise effective compensation of age-associated hearing loss, but also a whole number of additional functions ranging from monitoring of bodily functioning and health parameters to the communication and interconnection of healthcare providers, to the initiation and coordination of care service provision. At the same time, the development and implementation of hearables, often taking place in commercial contexts outside the medical domain and its established jurisdiction, raise a number of serious moral concerns that have found comparatively little systematic ethical consideration so far.

The talk aims to devise a systematic inventory and ethical analysis of moral challenges in the context of hearables. It starts from an introduction to the general ethics of assistive technologies that outlines important overarching approaches and criteria of ethical reasoning in this field. I will then briefly detail morally relevant specificities of hearable technologies, addressing aspects like embodiment, continuity, and pervasiveness. On this basis, I will identify main areas of ethical concern in the context of hearables, particularly highlighting questions of individual autonomy, privacy and data protection, ageist stigma and discrimination, and distributive justice. I will discuss the relevance of interdisciplinary research and stakeholder engagement for tackling these issues and draw conclusions for value-sensitive design and participatory technology development of hearable technologies.