temp_copy

By Dr. John Torous Image courtesy of Flickr user Integrated Change We often hear much about the potential of digital health to revolutionize medicine and transform care – but less about the risks and harms associated with the same technology-based monitoring and care. “It’s a smartphone app … how much harm can it really cause?” is a common thought today, but also the starting point for a deeper conversation. That conversation is increasingly happening at Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) as they are faced with an expanding number of research protocols feature digital- and smartphone-based technologies. In our article, ‘Assessment of Risk Associated with Digital and Smartphone Health Research: a New Challenge for IRBs” published in the Journal of Technology and Behavioral Science [1], we explore the evolving ethical challenges in evaluating digital health risk, and here expand on them. While risk and harm in our 21 st century digital era are themselves evolving topics that chang...

By Ryan Purcell, PhD Jim Schwoebel, presenter at April The Future Now: (NEEDS) Diagnosing schizophrenia can be complex, time-consuming, and expensive. The April seminar on The Future Now: (NEEDs) Neuroscience and Emerging Ethical Dilemmas at Emory focused on one innovative effort to improve this process in the flourishing field of digital phenotyping. Presenter and NeuroLex founder and CEO Jim Schwoebel had witnessed his brother struggle for several years with frequent headaches and anxiety, and saw him accrue nearly $15,000 in medical expenses before his first psychotic break. From there it took many more years and additional psychotic episodes before Jim’s brother began responding to medication and his condition stabilized. Unfortunately, this experience is not uncommon; a recent study found that the median period from the onset of psychotic symptoms until treatment is 74 weeks. Naturally, Schwoebel thought deeply about how this had happened and what clues might have been seen ear...

By Stephen Schueller Image courtesy of Pixabay . If you were to search the Google Play or Apple iTunes store for an app to help support your mental health you’d find a bewildering range of options. This includes nearly 1000 apps focused on depression, nearly 600 focused on bipolar disorder, and 900 focused on suicide (Larsen, Nicholas, & Christensen, 2016). But how much faith should you have that these apps are actually helpful? Or to take an even more grim position, might some apps actually be harmful? Evidence suggests the latter might be true. In one study, researchers who examined the content in publicly available bipolar apps actually found one app, iBipolar , that instructed people to drink hard liquor during a bipolar episode to help them sleep (Nicholas, Larsen, Proudfoot, & Christensen, 2015). Thus, people should definitely approach app stores cautiously when searching for an app to promote their mental health. One reason people might believe such apps could be helpful...

By Sorab Arora Sorab Arora is currently a Master’s in Public Health student at Emory University , specializing in Healthcare Management and Policy. He has researched health technology design and strategy focused on behavioral medicine, most recently at Northwestern University’s Center for Behavioral Intervention Technologies . Arora is a graduate of both the University of Chicago (Summer Business Scholar – 2017) and Grinnell College (2016), where he has bridged social entrepreneurship with mobile technologies and medical innovation.  With median adult smartphone ownership rising to nearly 70% in advanced markets, individuals ranging from wealthy millennials to homeless youth have unprecedented access to mobile technologies (Poushter, 2016; Ben-Zeev et al., 2013). From “swiping” potential soulmates to ordering prescription glasses to one’s door, the proliferation of opportunities for immediate gratification through mobile applications only continues to grow. In what economists have ...

By Sarah W. Denton Sarah W. Denton is a research assistant with the Science and Technology Innovation Program at the Wilson Center. Denton is also a research assistant with the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at George Mason University. Her research primarily focuses on ethical and governance implications for emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence, neurotechnology, gene-editing technology, and pharmaceuticals.  Tim Brown , University of Washington PhD student and research assistant with the Center for Sensorimotor Neural Engineering’s (CSNE) Neuroethics Thrust , introduced the session titled, “The Brain in Context,” at the International Neuroethics Society’s 2017 Annual Meeting moderated by Husseini Manji , Janssen Global Therapeutic Neuroscience Area Head. This session provided a multidisciplinary view of the challenges we face today in understanding the context of lived experiences and how our brains impact our environments. Getting at the h...

By Sunidhi Ramesh The main dome of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (Image courtesy of Wikimedia .) The morning of February 1, 2018, MIT President L. Rafael Reif sent an email addressed to the entire institute community. In it was an announcement introducing the world to a new era of innovation—the MIT Intelligence Quest , or MIT IQ. Formulated to “advance the science and engineering of both human and machine intelligence,” the project aims “to discover the foundations of human intelligence and drive the development of technological tools that can positively influence virtually every aspect of society.” The kicker? MIT IQ not only exists to develop these futuristic technologies, but it also seeks to “investigate the social and ethical implications of advanced analytical and predictive tools.” In other words, one of the most famous and highly ranked universities in the world has dedicated itself to preemptively consider the consequences of the future of technology ...