Big data and artificial intelligence (“AI”) promise to transform virtually all aspects of biomedical research and health care (Matheny et al. 2019), through facilitation of drug development, diagno...

Psychiatry is rapidly adopting digital phenotyping and artificial intelligence/machine learning tools to study mental illness based on tracking participants’ locations, online activity, phone and text message usage, heart rate, sleep, physical activity, and more. Existing ethical frameworks for return of individual research results (IRRs) are inadequate to guide researchers for when, if, and how to return this unprecedented number of potentially sensitive results about each participant’s real-world behavior. To address this gap, we convened an interdisciplinary expert working group, supported by (...) a National Institute of Mental Health grant. Building on established guidelines and the emerging norm of returning results in participant-centered research, we present a novel framework specific to the ethical, legal, and social implications of returning IRRs in digital phenotyping research. Our framework offers researchers, clinicians, and Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) urgently needed guidance, and the principles developed here in the context of psychiatry will be readily adaptable to other therapeutic areas. (shrink)

Digital contact tracing, in combination with widespread testing, has been a focal point for many plans to “reopen” economies while containing the spread of Covid‐19. Most digital contact tracing projects in the United States and Europe have prioritized privacy protections in the form of local storage of data on smartphones and the deidentification of information. However, in the prioritization of privacy in this narrow form, there is not sufficient attention given to weighing ethical trade‐offs within the context of a public (...) health pandemic or to the need to evaluate safety and effectiveness of software‐based technology applied to public health. (shrink)

Jecker and colleagues open (2024) a critical and needed dialogue about the ethics of international conferencing. In particular, they focus on proposing a set of principles in selecting the location...

McCradden et al. propose to close the “AI chasm” between algorithms and clinically meaningful application using the norms of evidence-based medicine and clinical research, with the rat...

Volume 20, Issue 10, October 2020, Page 79-81.

Advances in neurotechnologies, artificial intelligence (AI) and Big Data analytics are allowing interpretation of patterns from brain data to identify and even predict and manipulate mental states. Furthermore, there are avenues through which brain data can move into the consumer sphere, be reidentified and brokered. In response to these developments, there have been a number of approaches proposed to strengthen protections of brain data. To better understand the landscape of brain data protection discussions, we conducted a scoping review to identify (...) the rationales for establishing brain data protections and the proposals for protecting brain data offered in the ethics and neuroscience literature. To draw comparisons, we also surveyed the rationales given in the literature for the protection of sensitive behavioral inferences drawn from other types of personal data and associated approaches to achieving protection. This systematic examination of the rationale behind heightened protection for brain data should be useful to clarify the functional and conceptual bases given for brain data protection and to provide a better grounding for evaluating how the different approaches to brain data protection address these concerns. (shrink)

Sedlakova and Trachsel (2023) advocate for a holistic approach to assessing ethical application of conversational artificial intelligence (CAI) in mental health therapy. They first describe CAI as...

After the November 2020 U.S. presidential election, many political analysts looked at the voting patterns of Latinx communities with consternation and surprise. Some analysts noted that “Latinx” ha...

Digital mental health technologies have been promoted with the promise of delivering wide-scale access to more efficient and effective mental health diagnosis and care. During the pandemic, the rap...

Design bioethics, as defined by Pavarini et al. is “purpose-built, technology-driven research tools” that provide “the chance to leverage technological advances at the interface of engin...