Date: Tuesday, December 17th, 2024, Time: 11:00 AM – 1:30 PM
With the fast-paced adoption of digital technologies and their impressive intelligence capacities, international agencies including WHO recommend Governments from all countries to cooperatively lead efforts to effectively regulate the development and use of digital technologies. This exercise gains relevance as we observe the regulatory laws being written simultaneously with the evolving technologies. Additionally, scholarly literature also describes challenges with the de facto adoption of digital technologies for healthcare systems mainly due to two attributes of health systems: the dynamic nature of contextual complexities arising from interactions of agents, systems and their settings, and the value-sensitive nature of service delivery. Therefore, there is an urgent and unprecedented opportunity to usher in a new era of value-driven and value-informed healthcare technologies. At ADCOM 2024, a preconference stakeholder consultation workshop was conducted on 17th December 2024 by the Centre of Internet of Ethical Things (CIET) at the International Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore(IIITB) towards developing an ethical assessment framework for IoT/AI technologies used in health care. The workshop was led by Prof. Amit Prakash, Head of the Department, Department of Digital Humanities and Societal Systems. A closed engaging session with domain experts and relevant stakeholders allowed for a deep dive into a nuanced understanding of ethical challenges in the digital health space and an exploration of possible guidelines to be brought in to address these challenges. The preliminary findings of the research conducted by CIET on the relevant topic were shared with the delegates a week before the workshop to seek their feedback on the ethical assessment framework.
Delegates included
Participants
In-Person Delegates:
- Prof. Debabrata Das (Director, IIIT-B)
- Prof. Virginia Dignum (Umeå University, Sweden)
- Shrinath Honavalli (CEO, HealthyKid)
- A Vijayarajan (Founder & CTO, Inaccel Technologies)
- Prof. T.K Srikanth (IIIT-B)
- Raghu Chinahalli (VP, Ocwen Financial Solutions)
- Akash Narayana (EHRC, IIIT-B)
- Prof. Kurian Polachan (IIIT-B)
- Prof. Ramesh Kesthur (Adjunct, IIIT-B)
- Dr. Deepa Austin (Post-doc, CIET, IIIT-B)
- Swati Ganeshan (Research Associate, CIET)
- Ritika Mehrotra (Student, PGP-DPDM)
- Mr. Kannan V (Program Manager, CIET)
Online Delegates:
- Prof. Vinay Reddy Venumuddala (Mahindra University)
- Mr. Bhaskar Kumar Verma (NASSCOM)
- Sai Dattathrani (McAfee)
- Pratyush Sharma (World Economic Forum)
- Vinay Kumar (NASSCOM Startups)
Discussion Highlights
- Ethical Dimensions: Equity, Fairness, Trust, Dignity.
- No differential weightage assigned among the dimensions.
- Potential inclusion of ethical framework in RFPs and enterprise core values.
- Innovation must integrate ethics — not trade off with it.
- Law = baseline; Ethics = ceiling.
- Differentiating between people-oriented and process-oriented assessments.
- Importance of ethics-by-design in algorithmic systems.
- Involving diverse stakeholders to reduce evaluation bias.
Suggestions & Use Cases
- Framework should factor in scaling costs.
- Include checklists, akin to ISO compliance, to measure trust.
- Assess procurement processes to align with value-driven standards.
- Address challenges with limited data availability for testing.
- Evaluation needs to account for innovator maturity (early vs seasoned).
- Continuous rather than one-time ethical assessment.
- Special focus on mental health and sensitive data handling.
Action Items
- Develop interactive version of the framework.
- Include question-based assessment covering a spectrum of design and development choices.
- Include scaling cost considerations.
Next Steps
Final policy brief and detailed report to be submitted to the Government of Karnataka by March 2025.
Suggestions from workshop to be incorporated into the updated framework.
Field visits, interviews, and observations to continue through February 2025.