Tag: health

Digital phenotyping and sensitive health data: Implications for data governance

Josh Cowls

Mobile and wearable devices, such as smartwatches and fitness trackers, increasingly enable the continuous collection of physiological and behavioral data that permit inferences about users’ physical and mental health. Growing consumer adoption of these technologies has reduced the cost of generating clinically meaningful data. This can help reduce medical research costs and aid large-scale studies. However, the collection, processing, and storage of data comes with significant ethical, security, and data governance considerations. Here, we use the emerging concept of “digital phenotyping” to highlight key lessons for data governance that draw on parallels with the history of genomics research, while highlighting areas in which digital phenotyping will require novel governance frameworks.

A new paper in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association by Ignacio Perez-Pozuelo,  Dimitris Spathis,  Jordan Gifford-Moore,  Jessica Morley and myself has just been published.

Public Health in the Information Age: Recognizing the Infosphere as a Social Determinant of Health

Josh Cowls

Since 2016, social media companies and news providers have come under pressure to tackle the spread of political mis-and disinformation (MDI) online. However, despite evidence that online health MDI (on the web, on social media, and within mobile apps) also has negative real-world effects, there has been a lack of comparable action by either online service providers or state-sponsored public health bodies. We argue that this is problematic and seek to answer three questions: why has so little been done to control the flow of, and exposure to, health MDI online; how might more robust action be justified; and what specific, newly justified actions are needed to curb the flow of, and exposure to, online health MDI?

A new paper written by Jessica Morley, myself, Rosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi has now been published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.

The Ethics of AI in Health Care: a Mapping Review

Josh Cowls

This article presents a mapping review of the literature concerning the ethics of artificial intelligence (AI) in health care. The goal of this review is to summarise current debates and identify open questions for future research. Our goal is to inform policymakers, regulators and developers of what they must consider if they are to enable health and care systems to capitalise on the dual advantage of ethical AI; maximising the opportunities to cut costs, improve care, and improve the efficiency of health and care systems, whilst proactively avoiding the potential harms.

I am a co-author on a new paper written with Jessica Morley, Caio Machado, Chris Burr, Indra Joshi, Rosaria Taddeo and Luciano Floridi, now published in Social Science and Medicine.