2025/05/09 by Jonathan Herington, Mildred K. Cho · 1 voice · 1 citation
Medicine · Health Professions · #Ethics in Clinical Research #Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education #Electronic Health Records Systems
paper · doi:10.1080/15265161.2025.2497972
openalex publication_date 2025/05/09 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/21
Ambient intelligence systems (AIS) are increasingly deployed to provide persistent, artificially intelligent, monitoring and documentation of healthcare. AIS pose many ethical issues, including risks to the privacy of third parties, pernicious biases in predictive analytics, and intractable conflicts between the interests of patients, family members and care providers. In this paper we argue that these risks cannot be effectively navigated by applying a traditional bioethical framework. The traditional bioethical framework focuses heavily on protecting the autonomy and interests of a patient within the context of a single decision. An AIS, on the other hand, occupies a physical space and thus implicates multiple stakeholders, with interests that may conflict, in a setting where individually opting out of the interaction may be impractical or infeasible. Hence, we argue that, like many questions arising in the context of public health ethics, they should be dealt with through a "justice-first" approach to ethical theorizing.