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Invitation to the public to join our research: Ethics of i-sense technologies

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Are you interested in digital and mobile health?

As part of the i-sense Exploratory Project 'Building and Maintaining Public Trust in Early Warning Sensing Systems for Influenza', i-sense and the UCL Department of Philosophy invite the public to participate in a focus group on the ethical and practical issues surrounding our research.

The focus group will specifically look at the mobile phone connected-diagnostic test kits that i-sense is developing, as well as our tools to use the millions of symptoms reported on the web everyday, to map potential disease outbreaks before people attend clinics, or from geographical regions that are not covered by traditional public health systems.

Venue

This will take place in room B.05 at 31 Tavistock Square, London WC1H 9QU. A map can be found here.

At present, i-sense technologies are still in development. However, as part of research into the ethics of these technologies, we want to run a few focus groups to identify what concerns, if any, the public might have about them – and about similar disease surveillance tools.

For this focus group, we are seeking a wide group of people, to be representative of the UK population.

Participants will be asked to discuss various ethical questions relating to i-sense technologies including whether they would be happy to use the kind of diagnostic kits we are developing; whether they would be happy for i-sense to share data generated by the kits with the NHS, or other parties; and whether they are happy for researchers to use Twitter data, or Google searches, to track the spread of diseases.

The focus group would take place on Friday 4th December 2015 at 12.30pm.

Travel expenses will be reimbursed, and you will be given a small Amazon voucher in appreciation of your time.

i-sense have teamed up with the Department of Philosophy at UCL and the National Centre for Infectious Disease Surveillance to provide an analysis of the key ethical and regulatory challenges for early warning sensing systems for influenza. Our ultimate goal is to ensure that we balance privacy against the public good. The project will inform decision-making about the regulation and future development of the point-of-care technologies produced by i-sense and a proposed ethical and regulatory framework for point-of-care tests in the UK.

 

Related links

UCL Department of Philisophy

Exploratory Projects 2014: Early Warning Sensing Systems for influenza

If you wish to take part, please contact Benedict Rumbold, b.rumbold@ucl.ac.uk