Project Title

Co-design and ethical artificial intelligence for health

About

This project was carried out as part of my Master’s thesis.

Applications of artificial intelligence in health care are dynamic and rapidly growing. One strategy for anticipating and addressing ethical challenges related to AI for health care is patient and public involvement in the design of those technologies – often referred to as ‘co-design’. Co-design has a diverse intellectual and practical history, however, and has been conceptualized in many different ways. Moreover, AI/ML introduces challenges to co-design that are often underappreciated.

Approach

We review the research literature on involvement in health care, and involvement in design, and examine the extent to which co-design as commonly conceptualized is capable of addressing the range of normative issues raised by AI/ML for health care.

Results

We describe three main pitfalls associated with co-design for ethical AI/ML for health. We suggest that attention to these pitfalls is essential to determining the appropriateness and feasibility of AI/ML co-design for health and that by addressing them, it may be possible to advance approaches to co-design that better equip it to engage with the normative issues raised by those technologies.

To offer conceptual clarity in response to these issues, we also outline three areas we consider most salient to advancing the goal of co-design for ethical AI/ML for health.

Project Status

This project is complete.

This thesis is now available online.
An article in Big Data & Society can be accessed here.