Everyday ethics of smart care: health professionals and service users
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Emergent everyday ethics in infrastructures for smart care: perspectives of healthcare professionals and service users
IRAS ID
301772
Contact name
Christine Hine
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
University of Surrey
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 10 months, 30 days
Research summary
There is considerable current debate around best ways to ensure that artificial intelligence is developed to benefit society, to act fairly and to respect human rights to take decisions. To manage these ethical issues effectively, we need to know more about how ethical dilemmas arise and how they are resolved. Within smart care, remote monitoring technologies using artificial intelligence offer great promise to improve care for people living with long term conditions such as dementia and to enable them to live in their own homes. Potential ethical challenges arise regarding the features the technology should contain, who has access to data collected by monitoring devices and what actions should be taken in response. This project aims to understand how developers, services users and healthcare professionals involved in a smart care service encounter and resolve ethical dilemmas, through small-scale qualitative research using in-depth interviews. Each group will discuss similar topics, with the interview guide adapted to be accessible in each case. Approval has been granted by University of Surrey for the first phase of the research involving interviews with researchers and developers working in university or commercial settings. The second phase of the research, described in this application, will involve interviewing healthcare professionals involved in remote monitoring, and people living with dementia who are service users and their carers, in order to identify from each participants’ perspective when and how they become aware of ethical challenges, how they distinguish ethical challenges from other kinds of issue such as a technical problem and how they deal with the various kinds of issue. As a result we will learn more about the extent to which the ethical issues from diverse perspectives can be identified in advance. This will inform consideration of ways to build ethical decision-making into future projects.
REC name
South Central - Oxford B Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
21/SC/0332
Date of REC Opinion
20 Oct 2021
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion