Internet of Things (IoT) technologies play a key role in health management (e.g. in disease prevention, real-time telemonitoring of patients functions, testing of treatments, and health research data collection).
One of the main challenges of health-related IoT (H-IoT) is how to collect, share, process, and validate data across different domains of applications in ways that are economically efficient, technologically robust, and scientifically reliable, while respecting individual rights and hence fostering trust.
The DASH project collaborated with HMGCC, IMEC, InterDigital, TOSHIBA, and the European Medical Information Framework (EMIF) to develop a common information framework for data analysis H-IoT.
The project landscaped and evaluated current privacy and transparency protocols for data collection in H-IoT. Efforts focused on the analysis of the best data collection strategies and on developing effective guidelines for the design of H-IoT solutions that facilitate access to patient-level data, opening up new avenues of applications and research.
Guidelines produced by the project were benchmarked in a series of focus groups with relevant user partners and EMIF.
An ethically designed H-IoT will assist medical professionals, informal carers, and other health service providers in meeting their moral responsibilities in providing healthcare and management.
Users will likewise be empowered and protected from exploitation and harm stemming from the H-IoT. Ethical design is essential to ensure user interests are afforded sufficient protection by H-IoT devices and data protocols. By adopting these guidelines, developers can demonstrate a serious commitment to meeting their legal and moral responsibilities to users, care providers and other stakeholders, and can pre-empt many foreseeable ethical problems in the design and roll out of HIoT devices and protocols.
Project Outputs
The DASH project produced a number of academic outputs. Several peer-reviewed academic articles were published in leading journals in ethics and the social sciences:
Mittelstadt, Brent. 2017. ‘Ethics of the Health-related Internet of Things: A Narrative Review’. Ethics and Information Technology.
Mittelstadt, Brent. 2017. ‘Designing the Health-related Internet of Things: Ethical Principles and Guidelines’. Information.
Mittelstadt, Brent, Justus Benzler, Lukas Engelmann, Barbara Prainsack, and Effy Vayena. 2018. ‘Is There a Duty to Participate in Digital Epidemiology?’ Life Sciences, Society and Policy.
Mittelstadt, Brent, Patrick Allo, Mariarosaria Taddeo, Sandra Wachter, and Luciano Floridi. 2016. ‘The Ethics of Algorithms: Mapping the Debate’. Big Data & Society 3 (2). doi:10.1177/2053951716679679.
In addition, several talks reporting on findings of the DASH project were given at international conferences and workshops:
Conference – Computers, Privacy and Data Protection – 2017 – Brussels – Panel on the Future of Health and AI – Talk title: “The ethics of algorithms in medicine”
Conference – AI in Asia – 2017 – Waseda University, Tokyo – Panel on AI: Health and Biomedical Ethics Conference – BYTE Final conference – 2017 – London – Panel on Ethics in Big Data – Talk title: “Ethics of algorithms and the Health-related Internet of Things”
Workshop – The Ethics of Medical Data Analytics: Opportunities and Challenges – 2016 – University of Oxford, UK – Talk title: “The ethics of algorithms in medical analytics”
Symposium – Artificial Intelligence in Bioscience – 2016 – Royal Society, London – Member of panel on Ethics and AI in Bioscience