Smart homes, private homes? An empirical study of technology researchers' perceptions of ethical issues in developing smart-home health technologies.
Smart homes, private homes? An empirical study of technology researchers' perceptions of ethical issues in developing smart-home health technologies.
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DOI：
10.1186/s12910-017-0183-z
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发表时间：
2017-04-04
影响因子：
2.7
通讯作者：
Gooberman-Hill R
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Birchley G;Huxtable R;Murtagh M;Ter Meulen R;Flach P;Gooberman-Hill R
包括环境传感器、可穿戴设备和视频在内的智能家居技术正在吸引人们对家庭医疗保健服务的兴趣。开发这种技术的理由通常是，这种技术有可能提高长期患病者的自主能力。对智能家居伦理的研究提出了对隐私、同意、社会隔离和公平访问的关注。很少有研究调查智能家居工程师本身的道德观点。通过探讨工程研究人员在一个大型智能家居项目中的观点，我们试图为伦理学和工程界之间的对话做出贡献。无论是面对面还是使用Skype，我们对来自多中心智能家居项目的20名早期和中期职业智能家居研究人员进行了深入的定性访谈，他们被要求描述自己的经验，并更广泛地反映与智能家居设计相关的道德考虑。经参与者同意，对访谈进行了录音、转录和专题分析。出现了两个首要主题：在“隐私”中，研究人员表示，他们密切关注在当前工作中潜在的未经授权的信息共享的负面后果。然而，当讨论智能家居设计中超出其直接项目范围的更广泛问题时，研究人员在较小程度上考虑了物理隐私，尽管物理隐私可能表现为对被监视或监视的情感担忧。在“选择”中，研究人员表示，他们经常将向最终用户提供选择视为解决道德困境的一种方法。虽然研究人员指出，出于技术原因，可能需要限制最终用户的选择，但限制选择的道德立场通常是假定的，并嵌入设计中。信息隐私的易处理性可以解释对它的更多关注。然而，对物理隐私的担忧可能会降低智能家居技术对未来最终用户的可接受性。虽然对选择的关注表明与隐私有关，但这可能会错误地识别隐私的来源，并有可能给最终用户带来无法解决的问题的不公正负担。将选择和隐私的考虑分开可能会使两者得到更令人满意的处理。最后，通过我们与研究人员的参与，这项研究证明了（生物）伦理作为智能家居工程的重要合作伙伴的相关性。本文的在线版本（doi：10.1186/s12910-017-0183-z）包含补充材料，可供授权用户使用。
Smart-home technologies, comprising environmental sensors, wearables and video are attracting interest in home healthcare delivery. Development of such technology is usually justified on the basis of the technology’s potential to increase the autonomy of people living with long-term conditions. Studies of the ethics of smart-homes raise concerns about privacy, consent, social isolation and equity of access. Few studies have investigated the ethical perspectives of smart-home engineers themselves. By exploring the views of engineering researchers in a large smart-home project, we sought to contribute to dialogue between ethics and the engineering community. Either face-to-face or using Skype, we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 20 early- and mid-career smart-home researchers from a multi-centre smart-home project, who were asked to describe their own experience and to reflect more broadly about ethical considerations that relate to smart-home design. With participants’ consent, interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed using a thematic approach. Two overarching themes emerged: in ‘Privacy’, researchers indicated that they paid close attention to negative consequences of potential unauthorised information sharing in their current work. However, when discussing broader issues in smart-home design beyond the confines of their immediate project, researchers considered physical privacy to a lesser extent, even though physical privacy may manifest in emotive concerns about being watched or monitored. In ‘Choice’, researchers indicated they often saw provision of choice to end-users as a solution to ethical dilemmas. While researchers indicated that choices of end-users may need to be restricted for technological reasons, ethical standpoints that restrict choice were usually assumed and embedded in design. The tractability of informational privacy may explain the greater attention that is paid to it. However, concerns about physical privacy may reduce acceptability of smart-home technologies to future end-users. While attention to choice suggests links with privacy, this may misidentify the sources of privacy and risk unjustly burdening end-users with problems that they cannot resolve. Separating considerations of choice and privacy may result in more satisfactory treatment of both. Finally, through our engagement with researchers as participants this study demonstrates the relevance of (bio)ethics as a critical partner to smart-home engineering. The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12910-017-0183-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.